‘How long were you with this Markwell company?’

She spoke. He heard nothing after her first phrase. ‘Well, I was there about three years and then …’

Rochester! He gaped at her mouth forming the horrible stiff lipped drawl of Brooklyn. The shiny black dress that had seemed to sheathe the body of an unapproachably dignified woman from upstate now became a specially bought get-up for this interview; now it seemed to have cost about five ninety-five.

She kept talking. And gradually another reversal of impression shook him. Despite her snarl of an accent she really was dignified. For the first time he was able to inspect her face. What intrigued him was the arch of her left eyebrow. It had made her seem on the point of smiling, but now he knew she was not smiling. She was studying him, and somewhere in her brown eyes he had lost control of the interview.

She stopped talking, her eyebrow remaining relentlessly raised. He got to his feet and stood behind his chair – something he had never done in the presence of an applicant. But he could not direct things with his eyes on a level with hers.

She had a long face, he saw now, and it was made to seem longer by the upswept pile of hair. But it was not a thin face. The lips were full – and red – and the neck was broad and it rounded softly into the side curves of the jaw. The upper lids of the deep-set eyes were naturally dark and he imagined that when she slept her eyes looked slightly popped. Her forehead however, was what distracted him when he tried to decide about her face. It was so high and it curved out to such a width of powdered skin that her hair seemed almost to be receding from it; he kept trying to destroy the feeling that her forehead was occupying the whole office.

But for the forehead, he thought, she was quite beautiful. He had not met such a woman in his life, and yet he knew her for the effect she would have on him, for he had dreamed part of her – the part that heated him and broke into the even rhythm of his breathing. The part of her that had made the interview personal instantly on her entrance … The thing that now made him so certain that she was accessible to him. She was. He knew it.

‘Have you ever used an electric typewriter?’ he asked, as though it were of terrible moment to him.

‘Once in a while we had a chance to, but there was only one in the whole office. It wasn’t like this place,’ she said with some little awe. And indicating ’this place,’ she turned her head toward the floor of girls behind her. Mr Newman stopped any movement. She turned her face full to him again and he walked over to the filing cabinet, from where he could again see her profile. She waited a respectful moment, as though to give him time to look into a drawer, but hearing no sound she jerked her head to see him standing there looking down at her.