“Nothing, I suppose. It’s a Dutch name. My people—my father’s people—were Dutch, you know.” “A dirk’s a sort of sword, isn’t it, or poniard? Anyway, it sounds very keen and cruel and fatal—Dirk.” He would flush a little (one of his assets) and smile, and look at them, and say nothing. He found that to be all that was necessary. He got on enormously. XVII Between these girls and the girls that worked in his office there existed a similarity that struck and amused Dirk. He said, “Take a letter, Miss Roach,” to a slim young creature as exquisite as the girl with whom he had danced the day before; or ridden or played tennis or bridge. Their very clothes were faultless imitations. They even used the same perfume. He wondered, idly, how they did it. They were eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and their faces and bodies and desires and natural equipment made their presence in a business office a paradox, an absurdity. Yet they were capable, too, in a mechanical sort of way. Theirs were mechanical jobs. They answered telephones, pressed levers, clicked buttons, tapped typewriters, jotted down names. They were lovely creatures with the minds of fourteen-year-old children. Their hair was shining, perfectly undulated, as fine and glossy and tenderly curling as a young child’s. Their breasts were flat, their figures singularly sexless like that of a very young boy. They were wise with the wisdom of the serpent. They wore wonderful little sweaters and flat babyish collars and ridiculously sensible stockings and oxfords. Their legs were slim and sturdy. Their mouths were pouting, soft, pink, the lower lip a little curled back, petal-wise, like the moist mouth of a baby that has just finished nursing. Their eyes were wide apart, empty, knowledgeous. They managed their private affairs like generals. They were cool, remote, disdainful. They reduced their boys to desperation. They were brigands, desperadoes, pirates, taking all, giving little. They came, for the most part, from sordid homes, yet they knew, in some miraculous way, all the fine arts that Paula knew and practised. They were corsetless, pliant, bewildering, lovely, dangerous. They ate lunches that were horrible mixtures of cloying sweets and biting acids yet their skin was like velvet and cream. Their voices were thin, nasal, vulgar; their faces like those in a Greuze or a Fragonard. They said, with a twang that racked the listener, “I wouldn’t of went if I got an invite but he could of give me a ring, anyways. I called him right. I was sore.” “Yeh? Wha’d he say?” “Oh, he laffed.” “Didja go?” “Me! No! Whatcha think I yam, anyway?” “Oh, he’s a good kid.”