He shut the door, and in the intimacy of the room faced the two girls, one so devoted, the other perhaps equally devoted but whose devotion was outshone by her brilliant beauty. For him both typists were very young, but they were both women, familiar beings whom the crisis had transformed from typists into angels of succour; and he had ceased to be an employer and become a man who demanded the aid of women and knew how to rend their hearts.
"Is she in there?" he snapped, with a movement of the head towards the principals’ room.
"Yes," said Gertie. "Oh! Mr. Grig, she ought never to have come out in her state!"
"Well, God damn it, of course she oughtn’t!" retorted Mr. Grig. His language, unprecedented in that room, ought to have shocked the respectable girls, but did not in the slightest degree. To judge from their demeanour they might have been living all their lives in an environment of blasphemous profanity. "Didn’t I do everything I could to keep her at home?"
"Oh! I know you did!" Gertie agreed sympathetically. "She told me."
"I made a hades of a row with her about it in the hope of keeping her in the house. But it was no use. I swore I wouldn’t move until she returned. But of course I’ve got to do something. Look here, one of you must go to her and tell her I’m waiting in a taxi downstairs to take her home, and that I shall stick in it till she gives way, even if I’m there all day. That ought to shift her. Tell her I’ve arranged for the doctor to be at the house at a quarter to eleven. You’d better go and do it, Miss Jackson. She’s more likely to listen to you."
"Yes, do, Gertie! You go," Lilian seconded the instruction. Then: "What’s the matter, Gertie? What on earth’s the matter?"
The paragon had suddenly blanched and she seemed to shiver: first sign of acute emotion that Lilian had ever observed in the placid creature.
"It’s nothing. I’m only---- It’s really nothing."
And Gertie, who had not taken off her street-things, rose resolutely from her chair. She, who a little earlier had seemed quite energetic and fairly fresh after her night’s work, now looked genuinely ill.
"You go along," Mr. Grig urged her, ruthlessly ignoring the symptoms which had startled Lilian. "And mind how you do it, there’s a good creature. I’ll get downstairs first." And he stepped out of the room.