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“‘A girl without a sweetheart,’ girls—(I was readin’ something about it this very morning ’s I was coming along in the Toob),” chattered little Miss Holt over her work. “A girl without a sweetheart is like a ship at sea, without knowing what port she’s to put in at——”

“Accounts for the way a lot of ’em seem to pick their sweethearts on the principle ‘Any port in a storm!’” said Miss Robinson, with her little sniff.

“Well! Seems to me there’s a good deal in the idea that a poor husband is better than none,” came philosophically from Miss Holt, whose back is always curved like a banana over her typing-table, and who “smarms” her dull brown hair down under a hair-net until her head looks like a chocolate. “After all, my dear, if you’re married, you’re married; and nobody can say you aren’t. But if you aren’t married, you aren’t. And nobody can say you are!”.

“How true,” said Miss Robinson dreamily. “Got that, Miss Trant?”

And she gave a sardonic glance towards me, to see if I was thoroughly taking this in. I was trying not to. The buzz of Cockney whispering which goes on, intermittently, all day long in our murky “typists’-room” was beginning to get on my nerves again almost as badly as it did in the first week that I worked at the Near Oriental Shipping Agency. I didn’t raise my eyes. Then, above the click and the buzz, came a shriller:

“Miss Trant, if you please?”

My fingers fell from the typewriter, and I looked up with a start into the sharp little South-London face of our smallest office-boy.

“Yes? What is it, Harold?”

“Miss Trant, Mr. Waters says he wishes to see you in his private room at two o’clock.”

“To see me?” I asked in a panic; hoping that it might not be true, that by some lucky chance my ears had deceived me. They hadn’t.

“Yes; at two o’clock sharp, miss.”

“Very well, Harold,” I heard myself say in a small, dismayed voice.

Then I heard the door of our room shut upon the office-boy’s exit.

I turned, to meet the shrewd, sympathetic brown eyes of Miss Robinson over her machine.

“Governor sent for you?”

I nodded dismally.

“Any idea what it’s about, Miss Trant?”

“Oh, it might be about anything this last week,” I sighed. “It might be about my forgetting to enclose those enclosures to the Western Syndicate. Or for leaving out the P.T.O. at the bottom of that Budapest letter. Or for spelling Belgium B-e-l-g-u-i-m. Or half a dozen other things. I knew Mr. Dundonald was going to complain of me. It’s been hanging over me for the last three days. Anyhow I shall know the worst to-day.”

“P’raps he’ll give you another chance, dear,” said little Miss Holt.

“That’s not very likely,” I said. “He’s such an abominably accurate machine himself that he’s ‘off’ anybody in this office who isn’t a machine too, girl or man.”

“D’you suppose the Governor even knows which of us is a girl and which is a man? because I don’t,” put in Miss Robinson. “I bet you he——”

“Talking in theyairr!” interrupted the grating Scotch accent of Mr. Dundonald, as he passed through to the Governor’s room, where, alas! I, Monica Trant, was soon to present myself.

A deathly silence, broken only by the clicking of the four typewriters, fell upon our department.

But I’m pretty sure that all the work I did from then on until lunch-time was of very little good.

That gloomy typists’ room, looking over the “well” of the great buildings in Leadenhall Street, and so dark that we worked always by electric lights, switched on one over each machine, faded away from me. I ceased to know I was breathing in that familiar smell of fog and mackintoshes and dust and stuffiness. I ceased to hear the muffled roar of the City outside, and the maddening “click! click-a-click-pprring!” of the typewriters within, as I shut myself into my own mind.

Dismally I reviewed my own situation.

Here was I, “alone in London,” all my poor little capital spent on the business-training which I had joyfully hoped was going to bring me in a nice “independent-feeling” income of at least two pounds a week. At the offices of William Waters and Son, of the Near Oriental Shipping Agency, a post I had obtained after weeks of weary searching for work, my salary was twenty-five shillings a week. Now, in all probability, I was going to lose even that. And then what was I to do? How was I to go on contributing my half of the rent of the Marconi Mansions flat; how was I to pay for even my cheap meals and my “these’ll-have-to-do” clothes? How was I to earn my living?

Obviously, I’m not cut out for a business-girl!

My three months in the office has plainly shown me that.

“You lack method, Miss Trant”—as Mr. Dundonald, the head of our department, has told me more than once. “You lack concentrrayshn. You are intelligent enough, for a young lady, but when I think I can rrely on you, what happens? I find ye out in some rideeclus mistake that the rrrawest student from Pitman’s wouldn’t make. And this after I’ve warrrned you times and again. What do you think is going to be the end of it?”

Evidently the sack.

And what else is there I can do?

Nothing!

I can’t draw fashion-plates or write articles for the magazines.

Go on the stage—no, I never could remember my cue, even in private theatricals. I love children—but people want diplomas and Montessori Systems with their nursery-governesses. For serving in a shop I don’t suppose I’m tall enough. That’s one of the inconsistencies of men—they quote poetry about a girl being “just as high as their hearts,” and then advertise for parlour-maids and mannequins who must stand well over five foot nine, which I don’t. Though, even if my nickname is “Tots,” thank goodness I’m not dumpy, like little Miss Holt, who thinks a poor husband is better than none....

What about the principal profession open to women—getting married?

Well, but I never see any men, now a days—you can’t call things-in-the-City men, exactly—whom I could get married to. Besides, there’s nobody, now that I’m an unbecomingly-dressed pauper, who would want to marry me.—Except, perhaps ... Sydney Vandeleur ...? Dear old Sydney is a friend left over from the days before the smash in our family when “the world was more than kin when we had the ready tin.” I’ve seen him several times since, and he was just the same as ever, so sympathetic and amusing; such a “pal,” and with something about him that made me quite certain he’d be ready to become something more, the minute I encouraged him.

“Encouraging” him wouldn’t be too unpleasant either, though I never was in love with Sydney. By this time I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not a bit the falling-in-love type of girl. Major Montresor, of father’s regiment in the old days, told my brother Jack once that “little Monica had the makings of a first-class flirt; she belonged to the successful Order of the Cold Coquette.” After listening to the dodderings and drivels and despairs of girls who aren’t cold, I’m rather thankful that I am. At least I can be fond enough of people in a sensible sort of way. I could be of Sydney.

I suppose it will end in my getting him to marry me....

But not yet. I haven’t even got his address! He and his mother have gone on a tour to Japan, and they won’t be within reach for so much as a dinner for about a year. Whereas it’s to-day, this afternoon, that I’m to get the sack without knowing what else is to happen to me!

A pretty depressing outlook!

At one o’clock I went out to lunch at what the typists here call “The Den of Lyons,” with Miss Holt and Miss Robinson.

Our fourth typist, pretty, anæmic Miss Smith, had evidently made other arrangements to-day. She wore another hat; a fresh bunch of violets was tucked into her long coat, and she monopolized the looking-glass while she attended to her complexion with a pot of face-cream, a clean hankie, and a book of papiers poudrés.

“We’re extremely smart to-day, Smithie,” said Miss Robinson. “What’s on?”

“I’m going out to lunch with Still Waters.”

This was “the” office joke at the Near Oriental.

“Still Waters” meant no one less than Mr. William Waters, Junior, the head of the firm, who acted as General Manager, and from whom I had just received that fatal summons. He would as soon think of having a word to say to one of his typists out of business-hours as of giving a dance in the office itself. So that the excuse “I’m going out with Still Waters” always means that the speaker intends to keep her engagement to herself. It’s an open secret in the office that Smithie, who keeps a manicure-set in her hand-bag and who blushes twice daily down the telephone, has “got some sort of boy.”

“Oh, all right, haughty! Don’t bother to apologize,” said Miss Holt. And we left Miss Smith to her preparations.

Presently we caught sight of her again in the crowd outside. She didn’t see us, or anything else, I think. She was smiling and sparkling and flushed, and “looked as different as a fortnight’s holiday,” as Miss Robinson said. All three of us glanced from her to the young man she was with. To bring that transfiguring light into a girl’s face, wouldn’t you have expected him to be a mixture of some Greek God and Bombardier Billy Wells?—Far from it. “Smithie’s boy” was scarcely taller than she; narrow-chested office-shouldered, with a face as pale and peaked as a long envelope.

“What a kid!” criticized Miss Holt as we passed.

“All men are awful kids,” pronounced Miss Robinson, “but you do bar them looking it. Of the two, I don’t know that I wouldn’t rather have ’em like graven images!”

Which brought us back to the horrible subject of that graven image, our Governor.

Over glasses of hot milk and the poached-eggs-on-toast, the plates of which rasped on the marble-topped table of the shop that always smells of steak-and-kidney pie, the other girls made themselves specially agreeable to the colleague who was preparing for the sack in another hour.

“It is too bad. We shall miss you from our room,” said good-natured little Miss Holt. “Still—(Here, miss! I said egg, I didn’t say sardine-sandwich! I wish you’d attend when anyone speaks!... She would, if I’d a boy with me! Such is life!)—Still, it isn’t as if there wasn’t other posts you could get. Easily. Don’t you look so hopeless, Miss Trant. You’ve a taking way with you, and a nice smile; wasn’t I passing the remark, only the other day, about what a pretty smile Miss Trant’d got? And, say what you like, looks do count when a young lady’s in business!”

“Yes, it’s a pity Miss Trant don’t know she’s good-looking. We ought to have told her about that, before,” said Miss Robinson dryly. “But you’re all right. You’ll get taken on somewhere where they don’t make an international affair of it over one misplaced comma or a tiny smudge off a new ribbon. You’ll get round the men. I don’t mean Still Waters. He’s not a man, of course. He’s a machine that can say ‘Now, Miss Trant!’”—here she broke into perfect mimicry of the Governor’s curtest tone. “And’ What is the meaning of this evening’s cables being one-fifth of a second after time?’ He doesn’t count. You try for something where there’s a human being at the head of affairs——”

“And if it’s near she can come out to lunch with us just the same as before she left,” suggested Miss Holt.

“She hasn’t even left yet,” said Miss Robinson encouragingly. “What price one of those fancy cakes, Miss Trant? Choose the least poisonous-looking, and I’ll treat you—for luck!”

At a quarter to two we got back to the office.

I went and washed in the dressing-room. I took down all my hair. My hair’s my pet vanity; it’s very long and thick and silky, and “just the colour of massed black pansies against her honeysuckle-coloured flesh-tints,” as Sydney Vandeleur once said. He “puts” everything like the artist that he is. (Oh, why wasn’t it to meet him that I was preparing, instead of that young frozen ogre of a Governor?) I wound the long swathe smoothly round my head again, pinned it firm, and made sure it was all right at the back, not with any idea of impressing Still Waters (who would scarcely have noticed the fact had all his typists been completely bald, so long as they were efficient), but merely because to feel perfectly neat made me a little less painfully nervous.

The clock, striking two, chimed in with my humble tap at the door of Mr. Waters’ private room.

“Come in!” called the dreaded voice of our Governor.

And, trembling inwardly, in I went.