第15章 III(3)

She was tall yet she wasn't. She seemed thin, and when you looked again, you saw that she was really only slender, and beautifully shaped throughout."

Miss Burroughs laughed. "She must have been attractive."

"Not in the least. Absolutely without charm--and so homely--no, not homely--commonplace. No, that's not right, either. She had a startling way of fading and blazing out. One moment she seemed a blank--pale, lifeless, colorless, a nobody. The next minute she became--amazingly different. Not the same thing every time, but different things."

Frederick Norman was too experienced a dealer with women deliberately to make the mistake--rather, to commit the breach of tact and courtesy--involved in praising one woman to another. But in this case it never occurred to him that he was talking to a woman of a woman. Josephine Burroughs was a lady; the other was a piece of office machinery--and a very trivial piece at that. But he saw and instantly understood the look in her eyes--the strained effort to keep the telltale upper lip from giving its prompt and irrepressible signal of inward agitation.

"I'm very much interested," said she.

"Yes, she was a curiosity," said he carelessly.

"Has she been there--long?" inquired Josephine, with a feigned indifference that did not deceive him.

"Several months, I believe. I never noticed her until a few days ago. And until to-day I had forgotten her. She's one of the kind it's difficult to remember."

He fell to glancing round the house, pretending to be unconscious of the furtive suspicion with which she was observing him. She said:

"She's your secretary now?"

"Merely a general office typewriter."

The curtain went up for the second act. Josephine fixed her attention on the stage--apparently undivided attention. But Norman felt rather than saw that she was still worrying about the "curiosity." He marveled at this outcropping of jealousy. It seemed ridiculous --it WAS ridiculous. He laughed to himself. If she could see the girl--the obscure, uninteresting cause of her agitation--how she would mock at herself! Then, too, there was the absurdity of thinking him capable of such a stoop. A woman of their own class--or a woman of its corresponding class, on the other side of the line --yes. No doubt she had heard things that made her uneasy, or, at least, ready to be uneasy. But this poorly dressed obscurity, with not a charm that could attract even a man of her own lowly class-- It was such a good joke that he would have teased Josephine about it but for his knowledge of the world--a knowledge in whose primer it was taught that teasing is both bad taste and bad judgment. Also, it was beneath his dig-nity, it was offense to his vanity, to couple his name with the name of one so beneath him that even the matter of sex did not make the coupling less intolerable.

When the curtain fell several people came into the box, and he went to make a few calls round the parterre.

He returned after the second act. They were again alone--the deaf old aunt did not count. At once Josephine began upon the same subject. With studied indifference--how amusing for a woman of her inexperience to try to fool a man of his experience!--she said:

"Tell me some more about that typewriter girl.

Women who work always interest me."

"She wouldn't," said Norman. The subject had been driven clean out of his mind, and he didn't wish to return to it. "Some day they will venture to make judicious long cuts in Wagner's operas, and then they'll be interesting. It always amuses me, this reverence of little people for the great ones--as if a great man were always great. No--he IS always great. But often it's in a dull way. And the dull parts ought to be skipped."

"I don't like the opera this evening," said she.

"What you said a while ago has set me to thinking.

Is that girl a lady?"

"She works," laughed he.

"But she might have been a lady."

"I'm sure I don't know."

"Don't you know ANYTHING about her?"

"Except that she's trustworthy--and insignificant and not too good at her business."

"I shouldn't think you could afford to keep incompetent people," said the girl shrewdly.

"Perhaps they won't keep her," parried Norman gracefully. "The head clerk looks after those things."

"He probably likes her."

"No," said Norman, too indifferent to be cautious.

"She has no `gentlemen friends.' "

"How do you know that?" said the girl, and she could not keep a certain sharpness out of her voice.

"Tetlow, the head clerk, told me. I asked him a few questions about her. I had some confidential work to do and didn't want to trust her without being sure."

He saw that she was now prey to her jealous suspicion.

He was uncertain whether to be amused or irritated.

She had to pause long and with visible effort collect herself before venturing:

"Oh, she does confidential work for you? I thought you said she was incompetent."

He, the expert cross-examiner, had to admire her skill at that high science and art. "I felt sorry for her," he said. "She seemed such a forlorn little creature."

She laughed with a constrained attempt at raillery.

"I never should have suspected you of such weakness.

To give confidential things to a forlorn little incompetent, out of pity."