Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/365

 "Oh, I don't know. He had brains and—well, taste. He was the first to catch the possibilities of your little ideas. Business is business, but nowadays you have to disguise it. They want a light touch. The sort of thing you do so well—like the way your little birds have their heads cocked."

And the way my cheek used to go from the corner of my eye to my chin and probably doesn't any more and never will again, Grover was ruminating, stroking it absent-mindedly.

He looked up at her with a timid surmise. "I couldn't be of any use to you, could I? What's it all about?"

Rhoda was out of her chair now, pacing the floor. We've missed our train, he thought, as he heard Rhoda's secretary close the outer door. Suddenly she stopped before him, and looked at him with a steady regard, just daring to be hopeful.

"Would you?" she asked, a little breathlessly.

"Would I what?"

"Be a sort of adviser for a few months, to—to tide us over? . . . Fred Shadrock was advertising manager, but I've decided to be that myself from now on."

"Like Mussolini," Grover remarked, to key down the tension.

"What we need," Rhoda went on, thinking her way through, "is a man who's not too close to the wheels—who can stand off and squint his eyes and see what's