Jill turned pink. Mr Brown, her guide and mentor, foreseeing this situation, had, she remembered, recommended “pushing the office-boy in the face”: and for a moment she felt like following his advice. Prudence, or the fact that he was out of reach behind the brass bars, restrained her. Without further delay she made for the door of the inner room. That was her objective, and she did not intend to be diverted from it. Her fingers were on the handle before any of those present divined her intention. Then the stenographer stopped typing and sat with raised fingers, aghast. The girl at the telephone broke off in mid-sentence and stared round over her shoulder. Ralph, the office-boy, outraged, dropped his paper and constituted himself the spokesman of the invaded force.
“Hey!”
Jill stopped and eyed the lad militantly.
“Were you speaking to me?”
“Yes, I was speaking to you!”
“Don’t do it again with your mouth full,” said Jill, turning to the door.
The belligerent fire in the office-boy’s pink-rimmed eyes was suddenly dimmed by a gush of water. It was not remorse that caused him to weep, however. In the heat of the moment he had swallowed a large, jagged piece of candy, and he was suffering severely.
“You can’t go in there!” he managed to articulate, his iron will triumphing over the flesh sufficiently to enable him to speak.
“I am going in there!”
“That’s Mr Goble’s private room.”
“Well, I want a private talk with Mr Goble.”
Ralph, his eyes still moist, felt that the situation was slipping from his grip. This sort of thing had never happened to him before.
“I tell ya he zout!“
Jill looked at him sternly.
“You wretched child!” she said, encouraged by a sharp giggle from the neighborhood of the switchboard. “Do you know where little boys go who don’t speak the truth? I can hear him playing the piano. Now he’s singing! And it’s no good telling me he’s busy. If he was busy, he wouldn’t have time to sing. If you’re as deceitful as this at your age, what do you expect to be when you grow up? You’re an ugly little boy, you’ve got red ears, and your collar doesn’t fit! I shall speak to Mr Goble about you.”
With which words Jill opened the door and walked in.
“Good afternoon,” she said brightly.
After the congested and unfurnished discomfort of the landing, the room in which Jill found herself had an air of cosiness and almost of luxury. It was a large room, solidly upholstered. Along the further wall, filling nearly the whole of its space, stood a vast and gleaming desk, covered with a litter of papers which rose at one end of it to a sort of mountain of play-scripts in buff covers. There was a bookshelf to the left. Photographs covered the walls. Near the window was a deep leather lounge: to the right of this stood a small piano, the music-stool of which was occupied by a young man with untidy black hair that needed cutting. On top of the piano, taking the eye immediately by reason of its bold brightness, was balanced a large cardboard poster. Much of its surface was filled by a picture of a youth in polo costume bending over a blonde goddess in a bathing-suit. What space was left displayed the legend:
ISAAC GOBLE AND JACOB COHN
PRESENT
THE ROSE OF AMERICA
(A Musical Fantasy)
BOOK AND LYRICS BY OTIS PILKINGTON
MUSIC BY ROLAND TREVIS
Turning her eyes from this, Jill became aware that something was going on at the other side of the desk: and she perceived that a second young man, the longest and thinnest she had ever seen, was in the act of rising to his feet, length upon length like an unfolding snake. At the moment of her entry he had been lying back in an office-chair, so that only a merely nominal section of his upper structure was visible. Now he reared his impressive length until his head came within measurable distance of the ceiling. He had a hatchet face and a receding chin, and he gazed at Jill through what she assumed were the “tortoiseshell cheaters” referred to by her recent acquaintance, Mr Brown.