They found Dirk fair game, resented Paula’s proprietorship. Susans and Janes and Kates and Bettys and Sallys—plain old-fashioned names for modern, erotic misses—they talked to Dirk, danced with him, rode with him, flirted with him. His very unattainableness gave him piquancy. That Paula Storm had him fast. He didn’t care a hoot about girls.
“Oh, Mr. DeJong,” they said, “your name’s Dirk, isn’t it? What a slick name! What does it mean?”
“Nothing, I suppose. It’s a Dutch name. My people—my father’s people—were Dutch, you know.”
“A dirk’s a sort of sword, isn’t it, or poniard? Anyway, it sounds very keen and cruel and fatal—Dirk.”
He would flush a little (one of his assets) and smile, and look at them, and say nothing. He found that to be all that was necessary.
He got on enormously.
XVII
Between these girls and the girls that worked in his office there existed a similarity that struck and amused Dirk. He said, “Take a letter, Miss Roach,” to a slim young creature as exquisite as the girl with whom he had danced the day before; or ridden or played tennis or bridge. Their very clothes were faultless imitations. They even used the same perfume. He wondered, idly, how they did it. They were eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and their faces and bodies and desires and natural equipment made their presence in a business office a paradox, an absurdity. Yet they were capable, too, in a mechanical sort of way. Theirs were mechanical jobs. They answered telephones, pressed levers, clicked buttons, tapped typewriters, jotted down names. They were lovely creatures with the minds of fourteen-year-old children. Their hair was shining, perfectly undulated, as fine and glossy and tenderly curling as a young child’s. Their breasts were flat, their figures singularly sexless like that of a very young boy. They were wise with the wisdom of the serpent. They wore wonderful little sweaters and flat babyish collars and ridiculously sensible stockings and oxfords. Their legs were slim and sturdy. Their mouths were pouting, soft, pink, the lower lip a little curled back, petal-wise, like the moist mouth of a baby that has just finished nursing. Their eyes were wide apart, empty, knowledgeous. They managed their private affairs like generals. They were cool, remote, disdainful. They reduced their boys to desperation. They were brigands, desperadoes, pirates, taking all, giving little. They came, for the most part, from sordid homes, yet they knew, in some miraculous way, all the fine arts that Paula knew and practised. They were corsetless, pliant, bewildering, lovely, dangerous. They ate lunches that were horrible mixtures of cloying sweets and biting acids yet their skin was like velvet and cream. Their voices were thin, nasal, vulgar; their faces like those in a Greuze or a Fragonard. They said, with a twang that racked the listener, “I wouldn’t of went if I got an invite but he could of give me a ring, anyways. I called him right. I was sore.”
“Yeh? Wha’d he say?”
“Oh, he laffed.”
“Didja go?”
“Me! No! Whatcha think I yam, anyway?”
“Oh, he’s a good kid.”
Among these Dirk worked immune, aloof, untouched. He would have been surprised to learn that he was known among them as Frosty. They approved his socks, his scarfs, his nails, his features, his legs in their well-fitting pants, his flat strong back in the Peel coat. They admired and resented him. Not one that did not secretly dream of the day when he would call her into his office, shut the door, and say, “Loretta” (their names were burbankian monstrosities, born of grafting the original appellation onto their own idea of beauty in nomenclature—hence Loretta, Imogene, Nadine, Natalie, Ardella), “Loretta, I have watched you for a long, long time and you must have noticed how deeply I admire you.”
It wasn’t impossible. Those things happen. The movies had taught them that.
Dirk, all unconscious of their pitiless, all-absorbing scrutiny, would have been still further appalled to learn how fully aware they were of his personal and private affairs. They knew about Paula, for example. They admired and resented her, too. They were fair in granting her the perfection of her clothes, drew immense satisfaction from the knowledge of their own superiority in the matters of youth and colouring; despised her for the way in which she openly displayed her feeling for him (how they knew this was a miracle and a mystery, for she almost never came into the office and disguised all her telephone talks with him). They thought he was grand to his mother. Selina had been in his office twice, perhaps. On one of these occasions she had spent five minutes chatting sociably with Ethelinda Quinn who had the face of a Da Vinci cherub and the soul of a man-eating shark. Selina always talked to everyone. She enjoyed listening to street car conductors, washwomen, janitors, landladies, clerks, doormen, chauffeurs, policemen. Something about her made them talk. They opened to her as flowers to the sun. They sensed her interest, her liking. As they talked Selina would exclaim, “You don’t say! Well, that’s terrible!” Her eyes would be bright with sympathy.
Selina had said, on entering Dirk’s office, “My land! I don’t see how you can work among those pretty creatures and not be a sultan. I’m going to ask some of them down to the farm over Sunday.”
“Don’t, Mother! They wouldn’t understand. I scarcely see them. They’re just part of the office equipment.”
Afterward, Ethelinda Quinn had passed expert opinion. “Say, she’s got ten times the guts that Frosty’s got. I like her fine. Did you see her terrible hat! But say, it didn’t look funny on
