speaking to you. My name is Hettie Dowler—Miss, unfortunately! I've had two years in the University of Wisconsin. I've been secretary of Mr. Labenheim of the Tallahassee Life Insurance Company for the last year, but he's been transferred to Detroit. I'm really quite a good secretary. And I'm a Methodist—a member of Central, but I've been planning to switch to Wellspring. Now what I'm getting at is: If you should happen to need a secretary in the next few months—I'm filling in as one of the hotel stenographers at the Thornleigh—"
They looked at each other, unswerving, comprehending. They shook hands again, more firmly.
"Miss Dowler, you're my secretary right now," said Elmer. "It'll take about a week to arrange things."
"Thank you."
"May I drive you home?"
"I'd love to have you."
Not even the nights when they worked together, alone in the church, were more thrilling than their swift mocking kisses between the calls of solemn parishioners. To be able to dash across the study and kiss her soft temple after a lugubrious widow had waddled out, and to have her whisper, "Darling, you were too wonderful with that awful old hen; oh, you are so dear!"—that was life to him.
He went often of an evening to Hettie Dowler's flat—a pleasant white-and-blue suite in one of the new apartment hotels, with an absurd kitchenette and an electric refrigerator. She curled, in long leopard-like lines, on the damask couch, while he marched up and down rehearsing his sermons and stopped for the applause of her kiss.
Always he slipped down to the pantry at his house and telephoned good-night to her before retiring, and when she was kept home by illness he telephoned to her from his study every hour or scrawled notes to her. That she liked best. "Your letters are so dear and funny and sweet," she told him. So he wrote in his unformed script:
Dearest ittle honeykins bunnykins, oo is such a darlings, I adore you, I haven't got another doggoned thing to say but I say that six hundred million trillion times. Elmer.
