‘Good-morning, Miss Potter.  Lord Pinkerton in the office this morning?’

’He’s in the building somewhere.  Talking to Sir George, I think....  Did you fly this time?’

Whether he had flown or whether he had come by train and boat, he always looked the same, calm, unruffled, tidy, the exquisite nut.

‘Pretty busy?’ he would say, with his half-indulgent smile at the round-faced, lazy, drawling child who was so self-possessed, sometimes so impudent, often so sarcastic, always so amusingly different from her slim, pretty and girlish elder sister.

‘Pretty well,’ Jane would reply.  ‘I don’t overwork, though.’

‘I don’t believe you do,’ Hobart said, looking down at her amusedly.

’Father does, though.  That’s why he’s thin and I’m fat.  What’s the use?  It makes no difference.’

‘You’re getting reconciled, then,’ said Hobart, ’to working for the Pinkerton press?’

Jane secretly approved his discernment.  But all she said was, with her cool lack of stress, ‘It’s not so bad.’

Usually when Hobart was in Paris he would dine with them.

5

Lady Pinkerton and Clare came over for a week.  They stayed in rooms, in the Avenue de l’Opera.  They visited shops, theatres, and friends, and Lady Pinkerton began a novel about Paris life.  Clare had been run down and low-spirited, and the doctor had suggested a change of scene.  Hobart was in Paris for the week-end; he dined with the Pinkertons and went to the theatre with them.  But on Monday he had to go back to London.

On Monday morning Clare came to her father’s office, and found Jane taking down letters from Lord Pinkerton’s private secretary, a young man who had been exempted from military service through the war on the grounds that he was Lord Pinkerton’s right hand.

Clare sat and waited, and looked round the room for violets, while this young gentleman dictated.  His letters were better worded than Lord Pinkerton’s, because he was better at the English language.  Lord Pinkerton would fall into commercialisms; he would say ‘re’ and ‘same’ and ‘to hand,’ and even sometimes ‘your favour of the 16th.’  His secretary knew that that was not the way in which a great newspaper chief should write.  Himself he dictated quite a good letter, but annoyed Jane by putting in the punctuation, as if she was an imbecile.  Thus he was saying now, pacing up and down the room, plunged in thought:—­

‘Lord Pinkerton is not comma however comma averse to’ (Jane wrote ‘from’) ’entertaining your suggestions comma and will be glad if you can make it convenient to call to-morrow bracket Tuesday close the bracket afternoon comma between three and five stop.’

He could not help it; one must make allowances for those who dictate.  But Clare saw Jane’s teeth release her clenched tongue to permit it to form silently the word ‘Ninny.’

The private secretary retired into his chief’s inner sanctum.