It must be a woman. Probably Flandon was trying to keep it from his wife and that was what was on his nerves. Some little--Sable characterized Gage’s visionary lady impolitely. He thought on, his mind lighting, for no apparent reason, on Freda. And there it stopped. Queer, Flandon’s bringing that girl into the office. Bright enough but no experience. Unlike him too, considering his usual impatience with inexpert assistance. He wondered-- So while the Brownley girls gossiped in ugly, furtive, rather lustful conversations and Ted Smillie told his little discovery on occasion as being an instance of what those “smooth touch-me-not girls were usually up to”--while Mr. Sable, his mouth tight in repression and his eyes keen, watched and noted Freda. Freda went on her serene way. She was serene and she was happy. At times her happiness seemed to shut her completely off from every one--even in her thoughts from her father. She never tired of exploring her memory for the sound of Gregory’s voice, the touch of his hands, the mystery of love. More and more as the days went by she hugged her secret to herself. She could not have shared a vestige of it. Its exquisite privacy was part of its quality. She had the vaguest notions of what might be waiting her as Gregory’s wife. Certainly she might have a baby--normally that probably would happen to her in the next nine months. Gregory was poor. They’d have to work. And there might be hard things. She thought once or twice that it might be an ugly sort of proposition if she did not have the particular feeling she did for Gregory. But there it was. It wasn’t a matter of the mind--nor of physiology either. She didn’t believe it was physiology which made her deliciously faint and weak as she read Gregory’s strange letters--letters so frequent, so irregular, so curiously timed and written--on the back of a menu, on a scrap of envelope, on a dozen sheets of hotel paper. Each message, beating, alive, forcing its entrance. This was the love that according to Margaret was the undoing of her sex. She knew she would go anywhere Gregory wanted her to go, to be with him. That she knew her life with him would have its independence completely in so far as her own love allowed it, did not make it less clear to her that even if the independence had been less, if she had found him a man of convention she would none the less--but would she? She was immensely interested in possibly having a baby, and anxious to know about it. She wanted to tell Gregory. She wrote him letters in which she spent the deepest of her thought. She said things in her letters which would have astounded her if she had read them over. But she never did read them after she had written them. It would have seemed almost like cheating to read them as if for criticism.