"Oh, Mr. Stevens of the office. How do you do?" and she spoke with a delightful access of cordiality. "Will you come up?"
"Just for a minute, if I may. I won't keep you long."
"Wait, I'll let you in." The click-click-click sounded and he was on his way upstairs. She opened the door for him.
A quick glance. There was no other man in the room, anyway.
"Good evening," she said. "Won't you come in?"
"Why, yes," then very apologetically; "that is, if I'm not putting you out."
"No, indeed." He sat and paused. She smiled and did not help him.
"You're nicely located here, Miss Connor."
"Yes. I usually get a seat in the morning, but not coming back, of course."
"Yes, this time of year, but not so nice in winter when they don't clean the snow off the sidewalks."
He felt that it was a bit jerky. Perhaps he should first have asked her permission to call. What a goat he was not to think of that beforehand instead of now. He paused until the pause grew uncomfortable.
She tried to help him out, "We're out of the smoke belt, that's one thing."
He was seated in a rocking chair and began to rock violently, then suddenly he stopped and leaned toward her, his elbows on his knees.
"I've been slow getting to the point," he remarked abruptly, "but I came here on business."
Stevens took half a dozen life insurance advertising folders from his pocket. "You know this literature we're using," he said, running two or three through his fingers and indicating them by their titles, "'Do You Want Your Wife to Want When She's a Widow?' 'Friendship for the Fatherless,' 'Death's Dice Are Loaded.'"
"Oh, yes." She took them from him and read aloud. "'Over the Hills to the Poorhouse,' with a photograph of it, 'Will Your Little Girl Have to Scrub?' with thumbnail pictures of scrub ladies. Ugh, what a gloomy trade we're in, aren't we, Mr. Stevens?"
"This is the line of talk that gets the business." He spoke earnestly, tapping the folders. "You can't make papa dig up premiums for forty or fifty years unless you first scare him and scare him blue about his family."
"And what I came for is--well, will you--would you just as soon help me get up some more of these?"
"You mean work with you on them?" She was truly surprised.