opened to her as flowers to the sun. They sensed her interest, her liking. As they talked Selina would exclaim, “You don’t say! Well, that’s terrible!” Her eyes would be bright with sympathy.
Selina had said, on entering Dirk's office, “My land! I don’t see how you can work among those pretty creatures and not be a sultan. I’m going to ask some of them down to the farm over Sunday.”
“Don’t, Mother! They wouldn’t understand. I scarcely see them. “They’re just part of the office equipment.”
Afterward, Ethelinda Quinn had passed expert opinion. “Say, she’s got ten times the guts that Frosty’s got. I like her fine. Did you see her terrible hat! But say, it didn’t look funny on her, did it? Anybody else in that getup would look comical, but she’s the kind that could walk off with anything. I don’t know. She’s got what I call an air. It beats style. Nice, too. She said I was a pretty little thing. Can you beat it! At that she’s right. I cer’nly yam.”
All unconscious, “Take a letter, Miss Quinn,” said Dirk half an hour later.
In the midst, then, of this fiery furnace of femininity Dirk walked unscorched. Paula, the North Shore girls, well-bred business and professional women he occasionally met in the course of business, the enticing little nymphs he encountered in his own office, all practised on him their warm and perfumed wiles. He moved among them cool and serene. Perhaps his sudden success had had something to do with this; and
