She sat for a long while staring into vacancy, then found that something wet was dropping on her hands. She bathed her eyes and took the novel up again. A proposal occupied, she found, twelve pages of turgid, emotional dialogue; but, of course, her experience might be limited. Certainly it did not confirm the book’s verbosity. She was quite sure that she did not want Dubby Stewart. He did not strike her as humorous at all. CHAPTER XIX--EFFIE IN LOVE |SEVERAL causes combined to make her think of Sam, too, as not at all humorous when she saw him in the morning. Unlike him, she was not at her best in the early hours of the day, and the strain of arriving at an office by nine a.m. was one from which she did not recover for some time. She hated business, but without that cross of early rising she might have found it almost tolerable. She woke that day to her landlady’s rap more resentfully than usual. The world was disgustingly mismanaged. Why couldn’t she love Dubby, who was free? She couldn’t, but she hated Sam for being married, he had no right to be married. “Damn Mrs. Sam! Damn her!” she said heartily, by way of a morning prayer, as she ran hairpins viciously into her glorious hair. “But I’ll cure him of mud,” she added, as she raced downstairs to swallow the tea and toast which she took almost in the same rush that carried her from her bedroom to the tram. She reached the office and walked into Sam’s room to find him already in possession. His obvious briskness at that hour struck her as almost indecent; it was, at any rate, another cause for resentment, and one of which he was himself quite blandly unaware. He was not stealing a march upon her any more than he habitually stole marches on the rest of the world. He knew that early morning suited him, and used it to advantage. They were certain in town that Branstone had luck rather than brains because he was lazy; but if a man arrives at his office at eight a.m., and puts in two hours of solid work by ten o’clock, he is well ahead of his fellows of the employing class who go down to offices on the 9.21 from home. He can afford to appear lazy. He liked that uninterrupted hour with the books, opened the letters himself, and had them annotated before the men came, whose business it was to deal with their contents. He planned out the day’s work, and saw it in hand before his earliest caller came. After ten, which is the first hour when it is etiquette for a salesman to call, Sam was never too busy to talk of matters which were not strictly business--with the right, the gainful caller. It was known that one could kill time pleasantly with Branstone. Branstone was a lazy fellow, and his office a good place to sit in on a wet afternoon, when there was no point in going to Old Trafford.