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He peeped back from two houses away. She must have gone in without one glance toward him.

He told himself that he was glad their evening was over. But he swooped down on the Yale Club and asked five several men what they knew about jobs for a young woman, who, he asserted entirely without authorization, was a perfect typist, speedy at taking dictation, scientific at filing carbons—and able to find the carbons after she had scientifically filed them!—and so charming to clients that before they even saw one of the selling force they were longing to hand over their money.

He telephoned about it to a friend in a suburb, which necessitated his sitting in a smothering booth and shouting: “No, no, no! I want Pelham, not Chatham!” After he had gone to bed he had a thought so exciting and sleep-dispelling that he got up, closed the windows, shivered, hulked into his bathrobe and sat smoking a cigarette, with his feet inelegantly up on the radiator. Why not make a place for Emily in his own office?

He gave it up reluctantly. The office wasn’t big enough to afford her a chance. And Emily—Miss Pardee—probably would refuse. He bitterly crushed out the light of the cigarette on the radiator, yanked the windows open and climbed back into bed. He furiously discovered that during his meditation the bed had become cold again. There were pockets of arctic iciness down in the lower corners.

“Urg!” snarled Bates.

He waved good morning to Emily next day, but brusquely, and she was casual in her answer. At eleven-seventeen, after the sixth telephone call, he had found the place. He telephoned to her.

“This is Mr. Bates, across the street. ”

He leaped up and by pulling the telephone out to the end of its green tether he could just reach the window and see her at the telephone by her window.

He smiled, but he went on sternly: “If you will go to the Technical and Home Syndicate—the new consolidation of trade publications—and ask for Mr. Hyden—H-y-d-e-n—in the advertising department, he will see that you get a chance. Really big office. Opportunities. Chance to manage a lot of stenographers, big commercial-research department, maybe a shot at advertising soliciting. Please refer to me. Er-r-r. ”

She looked across, saw him at the telephone, startled. Tenderness came over him in a hot wave.

But colorless was her voice as she answered “That’s very good of you. ”

He cut her off with a decisive “Good luck!” He stalked back to his desk. He was curiously gentle and hesitating with his subordinates all that day.

“Wonder if the old man had a pal die on him?” suggested Crackins, the bookkeeper, to the filing girl. “He looks peaked. Pretty good scout, Batesy is, at that. ”

A week later Emily was gone from the office across. She had not telephoned good-by. In a month Bates encountered Hyden, of the Technical Syndicate office, who informed him: “That Miss Pardee you sent me is
a crackajack. Right on the job, and intelligent. I’ve got her answering correspondence—dictating. She’ll go quite a ways. ”

That was all. Bates was alone. Never from his twelfth-floor tower did he see her face or have the twilight benediction of farewell.

VI

He told himself that she was supercilious, that she was uninteresting, that he did not like her. He admitted that his office had lost its exciting daily promise of romance—that he was tired of all offices. But he insisted that she had nothing to do with that. He had surrounded her with a charm not her own.

However neatly he explained things to himself, it was still true that an empty pain like homesickness persisted whenever he looked out of his window—or didn’t look out but sat at his desk and wanted to. When he worked late he often raised his head with a confused sense of missing something. The building across had become just a building across. All he could see in it was ordinary office drudges doing commonplace things. Even Mr. Simmons of the esthetic spectacles no longer roused interesting rage. As for Emily’s successor, Bates hated her. She smirked, and her hair was a hurrah’s nest.