Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/27

 braying operatic strains, and Lester would lean back in a swirl of acrid tobacco smoke and survey his surroundings with great content. It was while he was conjugating the verb to live in this manner, and sowing (as someone has said) a notable crop of wild table d'hôtes, that he first realized the importance of Pearl Denver. Miss Pearl was Mr. Arundel's personal stenographer, a young woman remarkable in her profession by the fact that she never exposed the details of her camisole to the public gaze; also when the boss dictated she was able to rescue his subordinate clauses from the airy vacancy in which they hung suspended, and hook them up into new sentences capable of grammatical analysis. As a stenog she was distinctly above par, but not above parsing.

Lester, of course, had a speaking acquaintance with Miss Denver, but her existence had never really penetrated the warm aura of egocentric thoughts that enhaloed him. He knew her simply as one of the contingents of the office; and the office had proved a great disappointment to him. Not one of the "firm" (he called them "directors") wore spats; not one of them had shown the faintest interest in his suggestion that they publish a volume of Clara Tice's drawings. Lester must be