Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/122



HERE followed some weeks of peace, and once more Sorrell became a "person." The stoop went out of his shoulders; his eyes were clear; he sat at the head of the staff table and was addressed as "Mr. Sorrell." He had not realized his own incipient dignity, or that he was de veloping a certain "presence," and that the women respected him. They forgave him his rather silent attitude, his air of gentlemanly reserve, for after all he was a gentleman, born and in action, and his long thin figure and dark and intelli gent head were topped by a halo of mystery. For Sorrell was something of a mystery, and women love a mystery, especially when their intuition divines a kind and staunch reality at the back of it.

He was much discussed on the back stairs and in the kitchen.

"He's devoted to that boy of his."

"And a nice kid he is too. He's got such eyes, and a big laughing mouth. When he gets a bit older the women will want to kiss him."

It was not evident that the women wished to kiss Sorrell. He was more than a sex-man, and even the working women of to-day are more practically romantic than were their mothers. It seemed that Sorrell was not a marrying man; like Mr. Roland he was married to his job; but there were one or two women who were interested in his attitude towards marriage. Fanny Garland for one, fresh faced, cheerful, wholesomely ambitious. She had reasons for asserting to her secret self that she and Sorrell would make very good partners, that Sorrell's boy liked her and that she liked the boy. Both of them were saving money. Even Miss Murdoch—"the girl in the cage,"—who lived in rooms in Winstonbury and walked out each morning to immure her pale primrose gentility in the Pelican office, had a secret partiality for Sorrell. In fact—she did not hide it. From her cage her tired eyes watched life, the life that