Nellie Whitehead had been
dismissed!
This Nellie Whitehead, the stenographer-in-chief, was big, vigorous,
blond--vulgar, energetic, vivid; and Miss Munch, her assistant, a thin,
hollow-chested spinster, who loafed upon her job so that she might save
her sight for the manufacture of incredible yards of tatting, never
missed an opportunity to lift her eyes significantly behind her
superior's back.
"And what do you suppose?" Miss Munch was querying as Claire stepped
into the dressing-room. "She told Mr. Flint to go to hell!... Yes,
positively, she used those very words. And I must say he was a gentleman
throughout it all. He told her gently but firmly that her example in the
office wasn't what it should be and that in justice to the other
girls...."
Claire turned impatiently away. The fiction of Mr. Flint's belated
interest in the morals of his feminine office force was unconvincing
enough to be irritating. For a man who never missed an opportunity to
force his attentions, he was showing an amazingly ethical viewpoint. On
second thought, Claire remembered that Miss Munch was never the
recipient of Mr. Flint's attentions, which to the casual eye might have
seemed innocent enough--on rainy days gallantly bending his ample girth
in a rather too prolonged attempt to slip on the girls' rubbers,
insisting on the quite unnecessary task of incasing them in their
jackets and smoothing the sleeves of their shirt-waists in the process,
flicking imaginary threads where the feminine curves were most opulent.
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