“I really ought to be angry with you, Mr. Hilmer,” she purred at him, archly.  “It’s very nice of you to attempt to be so gallant, but, after all, talk is pretty cheap, isn’t it?...  So far I don’t seem to be making good as a solicitor.  So what else is there left?”

“How about being your husband’s stenographer?” he asked, without a trace of banter.

She forgot to be amazed.  “I don’t know anything about shorthand,” she replied, simply.

“Well, you could soon learn to run a typewriter,” he insisted.  “I have a young woman in my office who takes my letters direct on the machine as I dictate them.  She’s as good as, if not better than, my chief stenographer.  That would save your husband at least seventy-five dollars a month.”

She had an impulse to rise and sweep haughtily out of the room.  What right had this man to tell her what she could or could not do?  The impudence of him!  But she didn’t want to appear absurd.  She leaned back and looked at him through her half-closed eyelids as she said, with a slight drawl: 

“Would my presence in the office be a bid for your support, Mr. Hilmer?”

“It might,” he said, looking at her keenly.

She did not flinch, but his steady gaze cut her composure like a knife.  She got to her feet again.

“What silly little flowers!” escaped her, as she took a step near his desk and pulled a faded blossom from the blue vase.

He left his seat and stood beside her.  “I got them down by St. Francis Wood last Sunday,” he admitted.  “They reminded me of the early spring blossoms in the old country ... the sort that shoot up almost at the melting snow bank’s edge...  The flowers here are very gorgeous, but somehow they never seem as sweet.”

She looked at him curiously, almost with the expectation of finding that he was jesting.  This flowering of sentiment was unexpected.  It had come, as he had described his native spring blooms, almost at the snow bank’s edge.  She reached out, gathered up the faded blossoms ruthlessly, and dropped them into a convenient waste basket.

“Do you mind?” she asked, lifting her eyes heavily.

He did not answer.

Slowly she unpinned the flaming daffodils from her side and slipped them into the empty vase.  She stepped back to survey their sunlit brilliance, resting a gloved hand upon the chair she had deserted.  She was conscious that another hand was bearing down heavily upon her slender ringers.  The weight crushed and pained her, yet she felt no desire to withdraw...

The office boy came in.  She moved forward quickly.

“There’s a gentleman named Starratt waiting to see you,” he announced.

She threw back her head defensively.

“This way!” Hilmer said, as he opened a private exit for her.

She found herself in the marble-flanked hallway and presently she gained the sun-flooded street.  The blood was pounding at her temples and its throb hurt.