LSA was being dictated to: a process alien to her nature. She sat, cramping herself over the extended shelf of the roll-top desk, painfully jotting down shorthand in the narrow note-book; and Mr. Fitch loomed over her oppressively near. In fact, she felt as if she were resisting the dark strength of his personality, a huge wave that threatened to overwhelm her. His voice was intimate, low, determined, and now and then she felt his breath on her hand.
"—and it is the business of this Conference," he was saying, slowly, "to deal with these little waifs, not as little criminals, but as the victims of their heredity and environment."
Elsa did not follow the sense of this: over her shorthand notes, on which her eyes were focused, she saw in a blur his dark, large figure sharply splashed by the low electric drop-light drawing, it seemed, perilously closer. She was aware that she had a heart; she was aware that her mind could not concentrate, her thoughts scattering while she became tense with a delicious fear. Then she looked up startled, for Mr. Fitch was bitterly chuckling, as he sat back in his revolving chair and stuck his hands in his trousers pockets.
"'Victims of their heredity and environment!'" he muttered, glancing into her eyes, as Elsa thought, maliciously; "I'm sick of victims of heredity and environment. Are you a 'victim,' Miss Brack? Look at me; I'm a 'victim.'"
He laughed, but she could not laugh with him. Bidden to look at him, she obeyed, and her worst fears were reinforced. He was fairly tall; he was square-shouldered; he was dressed smoothly. The head was large, the hair light brown, the eyes brown, the nose slightly aquiline, and there was a cynical twist at the corner of his smiling mouth. But what was back of this exterior came shining through: the fighter, overflowingly masculine, absorbingly interesting to all that was feminine in her. She felt madly alone with a fascinating enemy.
Yet they were not utterly alone, there on the seventh floor of the Keystone Building at ten o'clock of a misty autumn night. Five wood-and-glass partitioned offices stretched in a row, and three of them had their shadows gilded by thin electric lights. In the other two were clerks, the plaintive scratching of whose pens could be dimly heard among the night noises of Pittsburg; the hoarse whistling of the trolleys making the loop, and the wailing sirens and the melancholy bells on the Monongahela River. The insisting, unceasing smell of soft-coal smoke, blowing from a thousand red furnaces in the night, came with strands of sooty fog through the open window.
Elsa had to speak; she felt she was blushing; she felt as if she were a bad child being scolded.
"What do you mean?" she asked, in a strained voice.
He clasped his large, powerful hands at the back of his head.
"Mean? I mean that I'm sick of piffle; sick of 'social work'; sick of looking after a lot of kids that ought to be spanked. And I'd spank 'em myself if I had the chance." He raised his clenched fists in the air before him. "Glory, I'm simply loony for a man-size job!"
She was shocked; she had not dreamed that any one could be in "Child Welfare" work who had not dedicated himself. And she was not sure that she desired Mr. Fitch to furnish her with personal revelations; at the same time, inexplicably, these words gave her a fierce pleasure, and she found herself saying:
"So this work is new to you?"
"New to me?" he echoed. He rose to his full height. "Just take a look, Miss Brack."
She followed him to the window, and was thrilled when he lightly pushed her before him to look out. She felt him leaning closely beside her, stooping to be on her level. At first all that she saw was lower buildings looming through the mist and the vague lights in the deep street corners, then she beheld green and red lamps almost lost on the river.
Mr. Fitch pointed. "See that flare up there?"
She saw a welling reddish flame far in the night, with a gust of lightnings lurid against the heavens.
"Yes," she whispered.