“How's everything else going?” Ditmar demanded, with unlooked-for geniality. “You mustn't take things too hard, Orcutt, don't wear yourself out.”
Mr. Orcutt was relieved. He had expected an outburst of the exasperation that lately had characterized his superior. They began to chat. Janet had escaped.
“Miss Bumpus told me you wanted to see me. I was just going to ring you up,” Ditmar informed him.
“She's a clever young woman, seems to take such an interest in things,” Orcutt observed. “And she's always on the job. Only yesterday I saw her going through the mill with young Caldwell.”
Ditmar dropped the paper-weight he held.
“Oh, she went through, did she?”
After Orcutt departed he sat for awhile whistling a tune, from a popular musical play, keeping time by drumming with his fingers on the desk.
That Mr. Semple, the mill treasurer, came down from Boston that morning to confer with Ditmar was for Janet in the nature of a reprieve. She sat by her window, and as her fingers flew over the typewriter keys she was swept by surges of heat in which ecstasy and shame and terror were strangely commingled. A voice within her said, “This can't go on, this can't go on! It's too terrible! Everyone in the office will notice it—there will be a scandal. I ought to go away while there is yet time—to-day.” Though the instinct of flight was strong within her, she was filled with rebellion at the thought of leaving when Adventure was flooding her drab world with light, even as the mill across the waters was transfigured by the heavy golden wash of the autumn sun. She had made at length the discovery that Adventure had to do with Man, was inconceivable without him.
Racked by these conflicting impulses of self-preservation on the one hand and what seemed self-realization on the other, she started when, toward the middle of the afternoon, she heard Ditmar's voice summoning her to take his letters; and went palpitating, leaving the door open behind her, seating herself on the far side of the desk, her head bent over her book. Her neck, where her hair grew in wisps behind her ear, seemed to burn: Ditmar's glance was focussed there. Her hands were cold as she wrote.... Then, like a deliverer, she saw young Caldwell coming in from the outer office, holding a card in his hand which he gave to Ditmar, who sat staring at it.
“Siddons?” he said. “Who's Siddons?”