He did fall in love before he had been with us a year. His love-affair was a romance for the whole office. He came among us every morning glorified; he left us in the afternoon as a knight enters upon a quest.
He told us about the girl. We pictured her perfectly before we saw her, as a little thing, with a mop of curled brown hair; an oval face, pearl-tinted; wide, blue eyes. He dwelt on all her small perfections the brows that swept across her forehead in a thin black line, the transparency of her slender hands, the straight set of her head on her shoulders, the slight halt in her speech like that of an enchanting child.
Yet she was not in the least a child. "She holds me up to my best, Miss Standish," Jimmie told me; "she says I can write."
We knew that Jimmie had written a few things, gay little poems that he showed us now and then in the magazines. But we had not taken them at all seriously. Indeed, Jimmie had not taken them seriously himself.
But now he took them seriously. "Elise says that I can do great things. That I must get out of the Department."
To the rest of us, getting out of the government service would have seemed a mad adventure. None of us would have had the courage to consider it.
8
