Page:E Nesbit - Man and Maid (1906).djvu/178

 and then suddenly the awkwardness of her position struck her. She did not know Aunt Kate’s surname. Abruptly to ask this grinning lout for “Aunt Kate” seemed absolutely indecorous. “I want to see the editor,” she ended.

She waited in the grimy office while the boy disappeared through an inner door, marked in dingy white letters with the magic words, “Editor—Private.” A low buzz of voices came to her through the door. She looked at the pigeon-holes where heaps of back numbers of the Girls’ Very Own lay in a dusty retirement. She looked at the insurance company’s tasteless almanack that hung all awry on the wall, and still the buzz went on. Then suddenly some one laughed inside, and the laugh did not please Kitty. The next moment the boy returned, grinning more repulsively than ever, and said: “Walk this way.”

She walked that way, past the boy; the door fell to behind her, and she found herself in a cloud of tobacco smoke, compressed into a small room—a very dusty, untidy room—in which stood three young men. Their faces were grave and serious, but Kate could