“I’ve never said so, but at the conclusion of the receivership I’ve intended paying you for your additional work.  If everything goes well my own allowance ought to be ten thousand dollars, and you’re entitled to a share of it.  I’ll say now that it will be not less than two thousand dollars.  I’ll advance you that amount at once and carry your personal note for the other thousand in the Fraserville bank.  It’s too bad you have to use your first money that way, but it’s natural for you to want to do it.  I see that you feel a duty there, and the folks at home have had that mortgage on their backs so long that it’s taken all the spirit out of them.  You pay the mortgage when it’s due and go down and make a little celebration of it, to cheer them up.  I’ll carry that thousand as long as you like.”

Miss Rose Farrell, nigh to perishing of ennui in the lonely office of the absentee steel construction agents, had been installed as stenographer in Room 66 a year earlier.  Miss Farrell had, it appeared, served Bassett several terms as stenographer to one of the legislative committees of which he was chairman.

“You needn’t be afraid of my telling anything,” she said in reply to Dan’s cautioning.  “Those winters I worked at the State House I learned enough to fill three penitentiaries with great and good men, but you couldn’t dig it out of me with a steam shovel.  They were going to have me up before an investigating committee once, but I had burned my shorthand notes and couldn’t remember a thing.  Your little Irish Rose knows a few things, Mr. Harwood.  I was on to your office before the ‘Advertiser’ sprung that story and gave it away that Mr. Bassett had a room here.  I spotted the senator from Fraser coming up our pedestrian elevator, and I know all those rubes that have been dropping up to see him—­struck ’em all in the legislature.  He won’t tear your collar if you put me on the job.  And if I do say it myself I’m about as speedy on the machine as you find ’em.  All your little Rose asks is the right to an occasional Wednesday matinee when business droops like a sick oleander.  You needn’t worry about me having callers.  I’m a business woman, I am, and I guess I know what’s proper in a business office.  If I don’t understand men, Mr. Harwood, no poor working girl does.”

Bassett was pleased with Dan’s choice of a stenographer.  He turned over to Rose the reading of the rural newspapers and sundry other routine matters.  There was no doubt of Miss Farrell’s broad knowledge of the world, or of her fidelity to duty.  Harwood took early opportunity to subdue somewhat the pungency of the essences with which she perfumed herself, and she gave up gum-chewing meekly at his behest.  She assumed at once toward him that maternal attitude which is peculiar to office girls endowed with psychological insight.  He sought to improve the character of fiction she kept at hand for leisure moments, and was surprised by the aptness of her comments on the books she borrowed on his advice from the Public Library.  She was twenty-four, tall and trim, with friendly blue-gray eyes and a wit that had been sharpened by adversity.