Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/44

32 “Come in there! Stop that chattering! Are you the two young women I sent for?”

We went in, standing like two guilty things. Mr. Slaughter sat at his desk.

“Which of you is Mary Blyth?”

“I am, sir.”

“Oh, you are, are you?”

He leant back in his chair, put his hands in his pockets, and looked me up and down, as if he was valuing me. He was a little man, with untidy hair and a scrubby black beard. I could not have been more afraid of him if he had been a dozen times as big. He had a way of speaking as if he would like to bite you; and as if he wished you to clearly understand that, should he have to speak again, he would take a piece clean out of you. Everybody about the place was more frightened of him than of Mr. Cardew. It was he who had made it what it was. In the beginning it had been nothing; now there were all those shops. He was a thorough man of business, without a grain of feeling in him. We all felt that he looked on us assistants as if we were so many inferior cattle, not to be compared, for instance, to the horses which drew his vans.

I could have sunk through the ground as he continued to stare at me. It was more than I could do to meet his eyes; yet something seemed to say that he did not think much of what he saw. His first words showed that I was right.

“Well, Mary Blyth, it seems that you’re an altogether good-for-nothing young woman. From what I find upon this paper it seems that there’s everything to be said against you, nothing in your favour; no good for business, no good for anything. And you look it. I can’t make out why you’ve been kept about the place so long; it points to neglect somewhere. It appears that you’re habitually irregular; three times yesterday you missed making a sale, and