She smiled in her mature, perfunctory manner as she took the chair I gave her.  She cast out her muff over my writing-table, and flung back the furs that covered her breast and shoulders, as if she had come to stay, as if it were four o’clock in the afternoon and I had asked her to tea for the first time.

I remember saying, “That’s right.  I’m afraid this room is a bit warm, isn’t it?”—­as if she had done something uninvited and a little unexpected, and I wished to reassure her.  As if, too, I desired to assert my position as the giver of assurances.

(And it was I who needed them, not she.)

She hadn’t been in that room five minutes before she had created a situation; a situation that bristled with difficulty and danger.

To begin with, she was so young.  She couldn’t have been, then, a day older than one-and-twenty.  My first instinct (at least, I suppose it was my first) was to send her away; to tell her that I was afraid she wouldn’t do, that she was too unpunctual, and that I had found, between nine-thirty and ten o’clock, somebody who would suit me rather better.  Any lie I could think of, so long as I got out of it.  So long as I got her out of it.

I don’t know how it was she so contrived to impress me as being in for something, some impetuous adventure, some enterprise of enormous uncertainty.  It may have been because she looked so well-cared-for and expensive.  I do not understand these matters, but her furs, and her tailor-made suit of dark cloth, and the little black velvet hat with the fur tail in it were not the sort of clothes I had hitherto seen worn by typists seeking for employment.  So that I doubted whether financial necessity could have driven her to my door.  Or else I had a premonition.  She herself had none.  She was guileless and unaware of taking any risks.  And that, I think, was what disturbed me.  The situation bristled because she so ignored all difficulty or danger.

Please don’t imagine that I regarded myself as dangerous or even difficult, or her as being, in any vulgar sense, out for adventure, or as balancing herself even for amusement on any perilous edge.  It was not what she was out for, it was, as I say, what she might possibly be in for; and what she would, in consequence, let me in for too.  She made me feel responsible.

“Let me see,” I said; “it’s typing, isn’t it?”

I began raking through drawers and pigeon-holes, pretending to find her letter and the sample of her work that she had sent me, though I knew all the time that they lay under my hand hidden by the blotter.  I wanted to give myself time; I wanted to create the impression that I was old at this game; that I had to do with scores and scores of young women seeking employment; to make her realize the grim fact of competition; to saturate her with the idea that she was only one of scores and scores, all docketed and pigeon-holed, any one of whom might have superior qualities; when it would be easy enough to say, “I’m sorry, but the fact is, I rather think I’ve engaged somebody already.”