Of course! Those flowers ought to have been thought “too precious” to share with anybody. Smithie would never think of giving one of her “boy’s” violets away. Dear me, I thought, what an added bore, having to remember to keep up the correctly sentimental attitude about every trifle of this kind.... _Ah!_ I broke off what I was thinking at that moment with quite a sudden start. For, just as she turned away, I had caught Miss Smith’s glance at that cluster of fresh, crimson carnations. It might have been a bunch of withered wall-flowers that had been left too long in water, for the disgusted wrinkle that lifted the prettiest typist’s small, powdered nose. “_I_ wouldn’t touch them,” it seemed to say. “Not _those_ flowers.” ... And at last I saw why. The reason my three colleagues had forborne to question, or chaff, or even look at me when I came in from that expedition with the Governor was _not_ because they were too considerate, too puzzled, or too wily. It was merely because they were shocked—scandalized! They were thinking worse things of me than I thought I saw behind Lady Vandeleur’s lifted lorgnette. I found myself suspected—probably more than suspected!—of having run counter to the standards of a class which is perhaps more innately virtuous than Lady Vandeleur’s and my own and Cicely’s, and certainly more rigid in its judgments. I remembered gossip about typists and their employers, gossip from the days when I was taking my training at Pitman’s. And out of this I could imagine for myself the tone of the talk about me that had passed across that marble-topped table in the “Den of Lyons” at lunch-time. “Well, Still Waters have been running deep, with a vengeance! This is the meaning of her taking down his letters for a whole fortnight—_without any complaints_, girls! We might have seen there was something funny in that!” “She’s been pretty artful, too, not letting on that there was anything at all, until to-day!—And there must have been some sort of beginning. A girl’s boss doesn’t take her out to a swagger lunch, with flowers and a new hat and all, without there’s been some sort of a leading up to it!” Perhaps Miss Robinson might suggest—“Well, I should never have thought she’d been that kind of girl. Fact of the matter is, I suppose she funked losing her job if she didn’t.” But Smithie and Miss Holt would chorus vehemently, “She ought to have lost her job, first! I would!—And chance it!” Yes; according to this jury of maidens, I was already pronounced “_Guilty_.” And, innocent as I was of anything they would have thought “mattered” in the least—for I don’t think the keeping-up of a false engagement would have outraged their conventions at all in comparison—I felt myself turn hot and cold with shame over the false position.