All these thoughts were mere foam on the great, darkly heaving thought that Felix had horribly misjudged her. Not his fault, of course; but he had misjudged her. Crying for a lost dance, indeed! She terribly wanted him to be made aware that she was only crying because she had experienced an ordeal to which she ought not to have been exposed and to which no girl ought to have been exposed. Miss Grig again! It was Miss Grig, not Felix, who had sneered at hold-ups. There had been no hold-up, but there might have been a hold-up, and, in any case, she had passed through the worst sensations of a hold-up. Scandalous!
Anxious to be effective, she took up the typing of a novel which had been sent in by one of their principal customers, a literary agency, and tried to tap as prosaically as if the hour were 11.30 A.M. instead of 11.30 P.M. Bravado! She knew that she would have to do the faulty sheet again; but she must impress Felix. Then she heard Felix calling from the principals’ room:
"Miss Share. Miss _Share_!" A little impatient as usual.
"Yes, Mr. Grig." She rushed to the mirror and patted herself with the tiny sponge that under Miss Grig’s orders was supposed to be employed for wetting postage stamps--but never was so employed save in Miss Grig’s presence.
"I shall tell him why I was crying," she said to herself as she crossed the ante-room. "And I shall tell him straight."
He was seated on the corner of the table in the principals’ room, and rolling a cigarette. He had lighted the gas-stove. A very slim man of medium height and of no age, he might have been thirty-five with prematurely grizzled hair, or fifty with hair younger than the wrinkles round his grey eyes! Miss Grig had said or implied that she was younger than her brother, but the girls did not accept without reserve all that Miss Grig might say or imply. He had taken off his overcoat and now displayed a dinner-jacket and an adorably soft shirt. Lilian had never before seen him in evening-dress, for he did not come to the office at night, and nobody expected him to come to the office at night. He was wonderfully attractive in evening-dress, which he carried with the nonchalance of regular custom. So different from her father, who put on ceremonial attire about three times a year, and wore it with deplorable self-consciousness, as though it were a suit of armour! Mr. Grig was indeed a queer person to run a typewriting office. Lilian was aware that he had been to Winchester and Cambridge, and done all manner of unusual things before he lit on typewriting.