The room, with its lack of appointments, was so unexpected a vision that the girl stood staring from walls to roof, until she observed her guide making urgent signs, and then she advanced towards the man who stood with his back to the tiny fire that burnt in the silver fireplace.
He was tall and grey; her first impression was of an enormously high forehead. The sallow face was long, and nearer at hand, she saw, covered by innumerable lines and furrows. She judged him to be about fifty until he spoke, and then she realized that he was much older.
“Miss Mirabelle Leicester?”
His English was not altogether perfect; the delivery was queerly deliberate and he lisped slightly.
“Pray be seated. I am Dr. Eruc Oberzohn. I am not German. I admire the Germans, but I am Swedish. You are convinced?”
She laughed, and when Mirabelle Leicester laughed, less susceptible men than Dr. Eruc Oberzohn had forgotten all other business. She was not very tall—her slimness and her symmetrical figure made her appear so. She had in her face and in her clear grey eyes something of the countryside; she belonged to the orchards where the apple-blossom lay like heavy snow upon the bare branches; to the cold brooks that ran noisily under hawthorn hedges. The April sunlight was in her eyes and the springy velvet of meadows everlastingly under her feet.
To Dr. Oberzohn she was a girl in a blue tailor-made costume. He saw that she wore a little hat with a straight brim that framed her face just above the lift of her curved eyebrows. A German would have seen these things, being a hopeless sentimentalist. The doctor was not German; he loathed their sentimentality.
“Will you be seated? You have a scientific training?”
Mirabelle shook her head.
“I haven’t,” she confessed ruefully, “but I’ve passed in the subjects you mentioned in your advertisement.”
“But your father—he was a scientist?”
She nodded gravely.
“But not a great scientist,” he stated. “England and America do not produce such men. Ah, tell me not of your Kelvins, Edisons, and Newtons! They were incomplete, dull men, ponderous men—the fire was not there.”
She was somewhat taken aback, but she was amused as well. His calm dismissal of men who were honoured in the scientific world was so obviously sincere.
“Now talk to me of yourself.” He seated himself in the hard, straight-backed chair by the little desk.
“I’m afraid there is very little I can tell you, Dr. Oberzohn. I live with my aunt at Heavytree Farm in Gloucester, and we have a flat in Doughty Court. My aunt and I have a small income—and I think that is all.”
“Go on, please,” he commanded. “Tell me of your sensations when you had my letter—I desire to know your mind. That is how I form all opinions; that is how I made my immense fortune. By the analysis of the mind.”
She had expected many tests; an examination in elementary science; a typewriting test possibly (she dreaded this most); but she never for one moment dreamt that the flowery letter asking her to call at the City Road offices of Oberzohn & Smitts would lead to an experiment in psychoanalysis.
“I can only tell you that I was surprised,” she said, and the tightening line of her mouth would have told him a great deal if he were the student of human nature he claimed to be. “Naturally the salary appeals to me—ten pounds a week is such a high rate of pay that I cannot think I am qualified—”
“You are qualified.” His harsh voice grew more strident as he impressed this upon her. “I need a laboratory secretary. You are qualified”—he hesitated, and then went on—“by reason of distinguished parentage. Also”—he hesitated again for a fraction of a second—“also because of general education. Your duties shall commence soon!” He waved a long, thin hand to the door in the corner of the room. “You will take your position at once,” he said.
The long face, the grotesquely high forehead, the bulbous nose and wide, crooked mouth all seemed to work together when he spoke. At one moment the forehead was full of pleats and furrows—at the next, comparatively smooth. The point of his nose dipped up and down at every word, only his small, deep-set eyes remained steadfast, unwinking. She had seen eyes like those before, brown and pathetic. Of what did they remind her? His last words brought her to the verge of panic.
“Oh, I could not possibly start today,” she said in trepidation.
“Today, or it shall be never,” he said with an air of finality.
She had to face a crisis. The salary was more than desirable; it was necessary. The farm scarcely paid its way, for Alma was not the best of managers. And the income grew more and more attenuated. Last year the company in which her meagre fortune was invested had passed a dividend and she had to give up her Swiss holiday.
“I’ll start now.” She had to set her teeth to make this resolve.
“Very good; that is my wish.”
He was still addressing her as though she were a public meeting. Rising from his chair, he opened the little door and she went into a smaller room. She had seen laboratories, but none quite so
