Still, he was wonderful.  She did not take it as warning of any coldness or unkindness in him that it was impossible to imagine him linked by a human relationship to any ordinary person like herself; there are pictures too fine for private ownership.  Just then he was being particularly fine in an exciting way.  He sat up very straight, flung out his great arm with a gesture of abandonment, and said that he would have no more to do with this house.  So might a conqueror speak of a city he was weary of looting.  He wanted to sell it outright, and desired Mr. Philip to undertake the whole business of concluding the sale with the Rio agents.  “It’s all here,” he said, and took from his pocket-book a packet of letters.  “They hold the title-deeds and you’ll see how things are getting on with the deal.  But I suppose the language will be a difficulty.  I can read you these, of course, but how will you carry on the correspondence?”

“Och, we can send out to a translator—­”

A tingling ran through Ellen’s veins.  The men’s words, uttered on one side in irritated languor and on the other with empty spruceness, had suddenly lifted her to the threshold of life.  She had previsioned many moments in which she should disclose her unique value to a dazzled world, but most of them had seemed, even to herself, extremely unlikely to arrive.  It was improbable that Mr. Asquith should fall into a river just as she was passing, and that he should be so helpless and the countryside so depopulated that she would be able to exact votes for women as the price of his rescue; besides, she could not swim.  It was improbable, too, that she should be in a South American republic just when a revolution was proclaimed, and that, the Latin attitude to women being what it is, she should be given a high military command.  But there had been one triumph which she knew to be not impossible even in her obscurity.  It might conceivably happen that by some exhibition of the prodigious bloom of her efficiency she would repay her debt to the firm and make the first steps towards becoming the pioneer business queen.  For it was one of her dreams, perhaps the six hundred and seventy-ninth in the series, that one day she would sit at a desk answering innumerable telephone calls with projecting jaw, as millionaires do on the movies, and crushing rivals like blackbeetles in order that, after being reviled by the foolish as a heartless plutocrat, she might hand a gigantic Trust over to the Socialist State.

“Mr. Philip,” she said.

Apparently he did not hear her, though the other man turned his dark glance on her.

“Mr. Philip,” she said.  He looked across at her with a blankness she took as part of the business.  “I’ve been taking Commercial Spanish at Skerry’s.  I took a first-class certificate.  Maybe I could manage the letters?”