"Oh! Yes," said she. And once more he saw that extraordinary transformation. She became all in an instant delicately, deliciously lovely, with the moving, in a way pathetic loveliness of sweet children and sweet flowers. Her look was mystery; but not a mystery of guile. She evidently did not wish to have her past brought to view; but it was equally apparent that behind it lay hid nothing shameful, only the sad, perhaps the painful. Of all the periods of life youth is the best fitted to bear deep sorrows, for then the spirit has its full measure of elasticity. Yet a shadow upon youth is always more moving than the shadows of maturer years--those shadows that do not lie upon the surface but are heavy and corroding stains. When Norman saw this shadow upon her youth, so immature-looking, so helpless-looking, he felt the first impulse of genuine interest in her. Perhaps, had that shadow happened to fall when he was seeing her as the commonplace and colorless little struggler for bread, and seeming doomed speedily to be worsted in the struggle--perhaps, he would have felt no interest, but only the brief qualm of pity that we dare not encourage in ourselves, on a journey so beset with hopeless pitiful things as is the journey through life.
But he had no impulse to question her. And with some surprise he noted that his reason for refraining was not the usual reason--unwillingness uselessly to add to one's own burdens by inviting the mournful confidences of another. No, he checked himself because in the manner of this frail and mouselike creature, dim though she once more was, there appeared a dignity, a reserve, that made intrusion curiously impossible. With an apologetic note in his voice--a kind and friendly voice--he said:
"Please have your typewriter brought in here. I want you to do some work for me--work that isn't to be spoken of--not even to Mr. Tetlow." He looked at her with grave penetrating eyes. "You will not speak of it?"
"No," replied she, and nothing more. But she accompanied the simple negative with a clear and honest sincerity of the eyes that set his mind completely at rest. He felt that this girl had never in her life told a real lie.
One of the office boys installed the typewriter, and presently Norman and the quiet nebulous girl at whom no one would trouble to look a second time were seated opposite each other with the broad table desk between, he leaning far back in his desk chair, fingers interlocked behind his proud, strong-looking head, she holding sharpened pencil suspended over the stenographic note-book. Long before she seated herself he had forgotten her except as machine. There followed a troubled hour, as he dictated, ordered erasure, redictated, ordered re-readings, skipped back and forth, in the effort to frame the secret agreement in the fewest and simplest, and least startlingly unlawful, words. At last he leaned forward with the shine of triumph in his eyes.
"Read straight through," he commanded.
She read, interrupted occasionally by a sharp order from him to correct some mistake in her notes.
"Again," he commanded, when she translated the last of her notes.
This time she was not interrupted once. When she ended, he exclaimed: "Good! I don't see how you did it so well."
"Nor do I," said she.
"You say you are only a beginner."
"I couldn't have done it so well for anyone else," said she. "You are--different."
The remark was worded most flatteringly, but it did not sound so. He saw that she did not herself understand what she meant by "different." HE understood, for he knew the difference between the confused and confusing ordinary minds and such an intelligence as his own--simple, luminous, enlightening all minds, however dark, so long as they were in the light-flooded region around it.
"Have I made the meaning clear?" he asked.
He hoped she would reply that he had not, though this would have indicated a partial defeat in the object he had--to put the complex thing so plainly that no one could fail to understand. But she answered, "Yes."
He congratulated himself that his overestimate of her ignorance of affairs had not lured him into giving her the names of the parties at interest to transcribe.
But did she really understand? To test her, he said:
"What do you think of it?"
"That it's wicked," replied she, without hesitation and in her small, quiet voice.
He laughed. In a way this girl, sitting there--this inconsequential and negligible atom--typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever stumbling into the traps of the crafty--they, too, would utter an impotent "Wicked!" if they knew. His voice had the note of gentle raillery in it as he said:
"No--not wicked. Just business."
She was looking down at her book, her face expressionless. A few moments before he would have said it was an empty face. Now it seemed to him sphynxlike.
"Just business," he repeated. "It is going to take money from those who don't know how to keep or to spend it and give it to those who do know how. The money will go for building up civilization, instead of for beer and for bargain-trough finery to make working men's wives and daughters look cheap and nasty."
She was silent.
"Now, do you understand?"
"I understand what you said." She looked at him as she spoke. He wondered how he could have fancied those lack-luster eyes beautiful or capable of expression.
"You don't believe it?" he asked.
