And she gave a sardonic glance towards me, to see if I was thoroughly taking this in. I was trying not to. The buzz of Cockney whispering which goes on, intermittently, all day long in our murky “typists’-room” was beginning to get on my nerves again almost as badly as it did in the first week that I worked at the Near Oriental Shipping Agency. I didn’t raise my eyes. Then, above the click and the buzz, came a shriller: “Miss Trant, if you please?” My fingers fell from the typewriter, and I looked up with a start into the sharp little South-London face of our smallest office-boy. “Yes? What is it, Harold?” “Miss Trant, Mr. Waters says he wishes to see you in his private room at two o’clock.” “To see _me_?” I asked in a panic; hoping that it might not be true, that by some lucky chance my ears had deceived me. They hadn’t. “Yes; at two o’clock sharp, miss.” “Very well, Harold,” I heard myself say in a small, dismayed voice. Then I heard the door of our room shut upon the office-boy’s exit. I turned, to meet the shrewd, sympathetic brown eyes of Miss Robinson over her machine. “Governor sent for you?” I nodded dismally. “Any idea what it’s about, Miss Trant?” “Oh, it might be about _anything_ this last week,” I sighed. “It might be about my forgetting to enclose those enclosures to the Western Syndicate. Or for leaving out the P.T.O. at the bottom of that Budapest letter. Or for spelling Belgium B-e-l-g-u-i-m. Or half a dozen other things. I knew Mr. Dundonald was going to complain of me. It’s been hanging over me for the last three days. Anyhow I shall know the worst to-day.” “P’raps he’ll give you another chance, dear,” said little Miss Holt. “That’s not very likely,” I said. “He’s such an abominably accurate machine himself that he’s ‘off’ anybody in this office who isn’t a machine too, girl or man.” “D’you suppose the Governor even knows which of us _is_ a girl and which is a man? because I don’t,” put in Miss Robinson. “I bet you he——” “Talking in theyairr!” interrupted the grating Scotch accent of Mr. Dundonald, as he passed through to the Governor’s room, where, alas! I, Monica Trant, was soon to present myself. A deathly silence, broken only by the clicking of the four typewriters, fell upon our department. But I’m pretty sure that all the work _I_ did from then on until lunch-time was of very little good. That gloomy typists’ room, looking over the “well” of the great buildings in Leadenhall Street, and so dark that we worked always by electric lights, switched on one over each machine, faded away from me. I ceased to know I was breathing in that familiar smell of fog and mackintoshes and dust and stuffiness. I ceased to hear the muffled roar of the City outside, and the maddening “click! click-a-click-pprring!” of the typewriters within, as I shut myself into my own mind. Dismally I reviewed my own situation. * * * * *