A tap at the door aroused him from his day-dream.

There entered a self-effacing young woman with pencil and notebook.
"Are you ready for me, sir?"

"Not quite. Sit down for a minute, Miss Smithers. Or, come up to the
table if you don't mind, and help me open these envelopes."

Paul, you see, was a great man, who commanded the services of a
shorthand typist.

To the mass of correspondence then opened and read he added that
which he had brought in from Colonel and Miss Winwood. From this he
sorted the few letters which it would be necessary to answer in his
own handwriting, and laid them aside; then taking the great bulk, he
planted himself on the hearthrug, with his back to the fire, and,
cigarette in mouth, dictated to the self-effacing young woman. She
took down his words with anxious humility, for she looked upon him
as a god sphered on Olympian heights--and what socially insecure
young woman of lower-middle-class England could do otherwise in the
presence of a torturingly beautiful youth, immaculately raimented,
who commanded in the great house with a smile more royal and
debonair than that of the master thereof, Member of Parliament
though he was, and Justice of the Peace and Lord of the Manor? And
Paul, fresh from his retrospect, looked at the girl's thin shoulders
and sharp, intent profile, and wondered a little, somewhat
ironically. He knew that she regarded him as a kind of god, for
reasons of caste. Yet she was the daughter of a Morebury piano
tuner, of unblemished parentage for generations. She had never known