The following week saw Miss Sands, of Virginia, private secretary to the
head of Randolph & Randolph, established in a little office between mine
and Bob's. She had not been there a day before we knew she was a worker.
She spent the hours going over reports and analysing financial statements,
showing a sagacity extraordinary in so young a person. She explained her
knowledge of figures by the hand-work she had done for the judge, all of
whose accounts she had kept. Bob and I saw that she was bent on smothering
her memory in that antidote for all ills of heart and soul--work. Her
office life was simplicity itself. She spoke to no one except Bob, save in
connection with such business matters of the firm's as I might send her by
one of the clerks to attend to. To the others in the banking-house she was
just an unconventional young literary woman whose high social connections
had gained her this opportunity of getting at the secrets of finance,
from actual experience, for use in forthcoming novels. It had got abroad
that she was the writer of great distinction who, under a _nom de plume_,
had recently made quite a dent in the world's literary shell--a suggestion
that I rightly guessed was one of Bob's delicate ways of smoothing out her
path. I had tried in every way to make things easy for her, but it was
impossible for me to draw her out in talk, and finally I gave it up. Had
it not been that every time I passed her office door I was compelled by
the fascination which I had first felt, and which, instead of diminishing,
had increased with her reticence, to look in at the quiet figure with the
downcast eyes, working away at her desk as though her life depended on
never missing a second, I should not have known she was in the building.
My wife, at my suggestion, had tried to induce her to visit us; in fact,
after I let her into just enough of Beulah Sands's story so that she could
see things on a true slant, she had decided to try to bring her to our
house to live. But though the girl was sweetly gentle in her appreciation