Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/156



Left to herself in her little room, Ellen put up no pretense of working; she had felt again, and more undeniably, a flow of response from Jay, and the tasks of her head and hands were become of no importance to her.

She could not be calm or still under the excitement of his notice of her; it had been brief and constrained but overwhelming in its separation from every other sensation. It set her supposing. Suppose it increased! Jay would be about the office daily and in and out with his father; he and she would be frequently together; and now he noticed her as a woman.

She glanced over the business letters heaped upon her desk, only to ignore them. Where was he gone? To his wife?

"His wife," Ellen whispered to herself, in reminder that he had married. He had done it without love, she believed, yet for whatever reason he had taken Lida Haige, she was his wife.

Ellen had become a city girl too recently to have exchanged, with her clothing, her ideas. She had substituted, even in winter, silk for wool overwear and underwear. Outwardly she conformed to metropolitan appearance; she went about in short fur jacket, offering silk stockings and oxfords to the winter wind, showing as trim an ankle and as slender a leg as any girl of the Avenue; but she clung to dreams about marriage which had been dreamt first in the hillside home where one woman waited upon