Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 40).djvu/762

 thing in the world seemed to have relaxed and become cheerful. Unfortunately, everything had included the customers. During the last few days they had taken their seats in moist gloom, and, brooding over the prospect of coming colds in the head, had had little that was pleasant to say to the divinity who was shaping their ends. But to-day it had been different. Warm and happy, they had bubbled over with gay small-talk.

"It isn't fair," she repeated.

Arthur, who was stropping a razor and whistling tunelessly, raised his eyebrows. His manner was frosty.

"I fail to understand your meaning," he said.

"You know what I mean. Do you think I didn't see you frowning when I was doing that gentleman's nails?"

The allusion was to the client who had just left—a jovial individual with a red face, who certainly had made Maud giggle a good deal. And why not? If a gentleman tells really funny stories, what harm is there in giggling? You had to be pleasant to people. If you snubbed customers, what happened? Why, sooner or later, it got round to the boss, and then where were you? Besides, it was not as if the red-faced customer had been rude. Write down on paper what he had said to her, and nobody could object to it. Write down on paper what she had said to him, and you couldn't object to that either. It was just Arthur's silliness.

She tossed her head.

"I am gratified," said Arthur, ponderously—in happier moments Maud had admired his gift of language; he read a great deal: encyclopaedias and papers and things—"I am gratified to find that you had time to bestow a glance on me. You appeared absorbed."

Maud sniffed unhappily. She had meant to be cold and dignified throughout the conversation, but the sense of her wrongs was beginning to be too much for her. A large tear splashed on to her tray of orange-sticks. She wiped it away with the chamois leather.

"It isn't fair," she sobbed. "It isn't. You know I can't help it if gentlemen talk and joke with me. You know it's all in the day's work. I'm expected to be civil to gentlemen who come in to have their hands done. Silly I should look sitting as if I'd swallowed a poker. I do think you might understand, Arthur, you being in the profession yourself."

He coughed.

"It isn't so much that you talk to them as that you seem to like"

He stopped. Maud's dignity had melted completely. Her face was buried in her arms. She did not care if a million customers came in, all at the same time.

"Maud!"

She heard him moving towards her, but