Mrs. Finnegan bent over her task again with a quick exasperated movement, and Claire passed on.  Her neighbor’s abrupt rebuke gave Claire a renewed sense of exclusion.  She had meant to be warmly appreciative, but she knew now that she had been only coldly polite.  But, as a matter of fact, the prospect of delving through a box of Gertrude Sinclair’s discarded finery moved her this morning to a dull fury.  She felt suddenly tired of cast-offs, of compromise, of all the other shabby adjustments of genteel poverty.  And by the time she reached the office of the Falcon Insurance Company her soul was seething with a curious and unreasonable revolt.  The feminine office force seemed seething also, but with an impersonal, quivering excitement.  Nellie Whitehead had been dismissed!

This Nellie Whitehead, the stenographer-in-chief, was big, vigorous, blond—­vulgar, energetic, vivid; and Miss Munch, her assistant, a thin, hollow-chested spinster, who loafed upon her job so that she might save her sight for the manufacture of incredible yards of tatting, never missed an opportunity to lift her eyes significantly behind her superior’s back.

“And what do you suppose?” Miss Munch was querying as Claire stepped into the dressing-room.  “She told Mr. Flint to go to hell!...  Yes, positively, she used those very words.  And I must say he was a gentleman throughout it all.  He told her gently but firmly that her example in the office wasn’t what it should be and that in justice to the other girls....”

Claire turned impatiently away.  The fiction of Mr. Flint’s belated interest in the morals of his feminine office force was unconvincing enough to be irritating.  For a man who never missed an opportunity to force his attentions, he was showing an amazingly ethical viewpoint.  On second thought, Claire remembered that Miss Munch was never the recipient of Mr. Flint’s attentions, which to the casual eye might have seemed innocent enough—­on rainy days gallantly bending his ample girth in a rather too prolonged attempt to slip on the girls’ rubbers, insisting on the quite unnecessary task of incasing them in their jackets and smoothing the sleeves of their shirt-waists in the process, flicking imaginary threads where the feminine curves were most opulent.  Not that Mr. Flint was a wolf in sheep’s clothing; he played the part of sheep, but he needed no disguise for his performance; he merely lived up to a sort of flock-mind consciousness where women were concerned.

The group clustered about Miss Munch broke up at the approach of Mr. Flint, who gave a significant glance in the direction of Claire Robson, intent upon her morning work.  But the excitement persisted in spite of the scattered auditors, and the fact was mysteriously communicated that Miss Munch’s interest in the event was chargeable to her hopes.  It seemed impossible to Miss Munch that any one but herself could succeed to the vacant post of stenographer-in-chief.