"You know you’ve no business in a place like this, a girl like you. You’re much too highly strung, for one thing. You aren’t like Miss Jackson, for instance. You’re simply wasting yourself here. Of course you’re terribly independent, but you do try to please. I don’t mean try to please merely in your work. You try to _please_. It’s an instinct with you. Now in typing you’d never beat Miss Jackson. Miss Jackson’s only alive, really, when she’s typing. She types with her whole soul. You type well--I hear--but that’s only because you’re clever all round. You’d do anything well. You’d milk cows just as well as you’d type. But your business is marriage, and a good marriage! You’re beautiful, and, as I say, you have an instinct to please. That’s the important thing. You’d make a success of marriage because of that and because you’re adaptable and quick at picking up. Most women when they’re married forget that their job is to adapt themselves and to please. That’s their _job_. They expect to be kowtowed to and spoilt and humoured and to be free to spend money without having to earn it, and to do nothing in return except just exist--and perhaps manage a household, pretty badly. They seem to forget that there are two sides to a bargain. It’s dashed hard work, pleasing is, sometimes. I know that. But it isn’t so hard as earning money, believe me! Now you wouldn’t be like the majority of women. You’d keep your share of the bargain, and handsomely. If you don’t marry, and marry fifty miles above you, you’ll be very silly. For you to stop here is an outrage against common-sense. It’s merely monstrous. If I wasn’t an old man I wouldn’t tell you this, naturally. Now you needn’t blush. I expect I’m not far off thirty years older than you--and you’re young enough to be wise in time." She was blushing tremendously, and in spite of an effort of courage her gaze dropped from his. At length his gaze shifted, on the pretext of dropping cigarette-ash very carefully into an ash-tray. He had, then, been thinking about her all those months, differentiating her from the others, summing her up! And how well he had summed her up, and how well he had expressed himself--so romantically (somehow) and yet with such obvious truth! (Of course he had been having a dig at his own wife, who had divorced him! You could see how embittered he was on the subject of wives!) She wondered if he had thought her beautiful for long. Fancy him moving about the office and forming ideas about all of them, and never a sign, never the slightest sign that he could tell one of them from another! And he had chosen that night to reveal his mind to her. She was inexpressibly flattered. Because Mr. Grig was clearly a connoisseur--she had always felt that. If Mr. Grig considered her beautiful...!