“About done?” he asked impatiently.

She glanced up.  “In a moment.  I’m sorry to be so slow.”

“You’re not,” he assured her truthfully.  “It’s my impatience.  Let me see the pages you’ve finished.”

With them he was able to concentrate his mind.  When she laid the last page beside his arm he was absorbed, did not look at her, did not think of her.  “Take the machine away,” said he abruptly.

He was leaving for the day when he remembered her again.  He sent for her.  “I forgot to thank you.  It was good work.  You will do well.  All you need is practice—­and confidence.  Especially confidence.”  He looked at her.  She seemed frail—­touchingly frail.  “You are not strong?”

She smiled, and in an instant the frailty seemed to have been mere delicacy of build—­the delicacy that goes with the strength of steel wires, or rather of the spider’s weaving thread which sustains weights and shocks out of all proportion to its appearance.  “I’ve never been ill in my life,” said she.  “Not a day.”

Again, because she was standing before him in full view, he noted the peculiar construction of her frame—­the beautiful lines of length so dextrously combined that her figure as a whole was not tall.  He said, “A working woman—­or man—­needs health above all.  Thank you again.”  And he nodded a somewhat curt dismissal.  When she glided away and he was alone behind the closed door, he reflected for a moment upon the extraordinary amount of thinking—­and the extraordinary kind of thinking—­into which this poor little typewriter girl had beguiled him.  He soon found the explanation for this vagary into a realm so foreign to a man of his high tastes and ambitions.  “It’s because I’m so in love with Josephine,” he decided.  “I’ve fallen into the sentimental state of all lovers.  The whole sex becomes novel and interesting and worth while.”

As he left the office, unusually late, he saw her still at work—­no doubt doing over again some bungled piece of copying.  She had her normal and natural look and air—­the atomic little typewriter, unattractive and uninteresting.  With another smile for his romantic imaginings, he forgot her.  But when he reached the street he remembered her again.  The threatened blizzard had changed into a heavy rain.  The swift and sudden currents of air, that have made of New York a cave of the winds since the coming of the skyscrapers, were darting round corners, turning umbrellas inside out, tossing women’s skirts about their heads, reducing all who were abroad to the same level of drenched and sullen wretchedness.  Norman’s limousine was waiting at the curb.  He, pausing in the doorway, glanced up and down the street, had an impulse to return and take the girl home.  Then he smiled satirically at himself.  Her lot condemned her to be out in all weathers.  It would not be a kindness but an exhibition of smug vanity to shelter her this one night; also, there was the question of her reputation—­and the possibility of turning her head, perhaps just enough to cause her ruin.  He sprang across the wind-swept, rain-swept sidewalk and into the limousine whose door was being held open by an obsequious attendant.  “Home,” he said, and the door slammed.