And he had hardly spoken to her! But his dreams were vibrant with the music of her voice, swelling like an organ till it filled his life with new harmony. It filled his life not because he refused to think of Ada, but because he could not think of her. Ada wasn’t there; she didn’t exist. She never had been there, for Sam, in the true sense, so that the step from the custom which is nothingness to complete nothingness was almost imperceptible. She was a ghost from the past fading in the radiance of the present. The sun puts out the candlelight. He was seeing Effie, of course, with quite grotesquely unperceiving eyes. She might have been, for all he saw of her, the beautiful doll she emphatically was not. Her outside pleased and satisfied his eye, and he took it for granted that the woman within would satisfy him in the same way as the woman without. And so, in the long run, she did, but not till Sam had made a hurdle race of it and come some awkward croppers on the course. The harmony of his organ dream might have been true prophecy; it certainly was not present fact. He wasn’t seeing himself as Effie saw him, or the sidelong glances he cast at her pretty neck might have expressed more desire to break than to kiss it. He seemed to her a jolly monster, quite lovable if trained, but at present as untrained as a badly brought-up dog, and perhaps too old to learn. But it might be amusing to see if he could learn, and from her who was not used to breaking in a mastiff. That made the thing worth while, his bigness and the lovableness she recognized behind the rankness of him. Chance might not come her way, and she thought it unlikely that it would, but if it did, she meant to take it with both hands. Effie, aged twenty-six, proposed to herself to form Sam Bran-stone, who was thirty-five and her employer! She smiled at her preposterous audacity, but the more she saw and the more she heard of him, the more determination bit into her. Droll, officious, absurd--all these her idea was, and she liked it because it was fantastic and because Sam was Sam. In Effie’s wise, impertinent eyes fantasy and Sam seemed bound together. And yet he paid her wages; he was a solid man, a member of the Council, and a serious politician! She was impertinent indeed. But he could not, either for his sake or hers, keep her for ever on the threshold. For all his late-won confidence he was quite pitiably nervous, and held back for days in pure hesitation before the simple action of calling her into his office. He thought of it as initiation, a ritual to which a high solemnity attached. He intended to act up to its solemnity, to usher her into that office with all that was most impressive, to signify to her the importance of being secretary to Branstone; and, instead, he who was wordy fumbled for words, he who was painfully correct dropped two aitches in a sentence, and stood there most comically aghast at his slip.