The Separate Room

It was clear that Bergsma was pleased, and Marion Cameron held her
breath in thrilled alarm.

"You've done it--why! you've done it rippingly," said Bergsma, in his
intermittent foreign accent, which now made a w and y precede the r in
"rippingly." He did not look up, but read on eagerly from the sheet
that Marion had typed for him, this morning, before he came into the
study. She had felt tired, on waking, after the late evening with its
difficult job, and then the exciting sense of having done it not so
badly; she had hardly slept a wink, but she was at Bergsma's house
much earlier than usual, so that all should be in best array when
Bergsma came, and she herself in something that might figure as
composure.

"So it was interesting," Bergsma said, still reading. "Miss Grey was
in good voice, and Woolley not too--woolly?" He grinned at his mild
joke, but still did not look up.

"Miss Grey was splendid," Marion said, in her clear solemn tones; "and
Mr. Woolley was. . ."

She stopped. She wanted to acknowledge the joke, to say that Mr.
Woolley had been something textile, but the word would not present
itself, and Marion gave it up. "Mr. Woolley was quite good."

"Loose?" asked Bergsma, with another grin.

"Loose--Mr. Woolley?"

He glanced at her. "The part--it's quelque peu! I thought he might
have 'given' a bit for once, pulled his voice out...ah, peste, no more
of it!" He frowned.

Marion blushed. She knew she had been slow, and knew that Bergsma
hated slowness.

He laid the sheet aside. "It's all right. Send it off." Now he looked
up, and at her. "You enjoyed it--the job, I mean?"

"Indeed I did," she answered with the full force of her earnestness.

He turned his thick blue eyes away.

"Like to do it again?"

"If you think I'm worthy..." Marion said, a shade more solemnly still.
All at once a different mood seized Bergsma. "Oh, any intelligent
person can turn out a notice like that. It wasn't an important
production... You've done it very nicely." He took the morning paper;
Marion knew she was dismissed to her own table in the corner.

This kind of thing had happened before--the disconcerting change of
tone, when she had thought that he was really pleased beyond the
ordinary limits of a secretary's "giving-of-satisfaction."

Marion did not resent, but she would have liked to understand it. Was
it something in him, or in herself, that brought the quick reaction?
For she knew, as she had known before, that this was not the mere
return to business-manner when the moment for expansion is over. No;
he was cross, and about something that was definite, to him.

She put up her article for post--the first words she had ever written
for print, and they were to appear, in the foremost musical weekly,
not as hers but his. She was Bergsma's "ghost!" Marion, when first she
had realized that this was what she was to be, had smiled to herself
with the humour of which, for all her lack of wit, she was capable.
Bergsma's ghost--a ludicrously dissimilar one! He was short and squat,
with a flat, smooth, white face, and thick, prominent, most heavy-
lidded eyes that deadened into boredom frankly and alarmingly: "the
eyes of genius," somebody had said of them to Marion. Certainly, if
that power of extinguishing his eyes were proof of genius, Bergsma had
it; and if the other power of lighting so excitedly that they lit up
his whole face were further proof, the eyes doubly marked him. That
was what made it comic that she should be his ghost. Marion's eyes
were large, but that was the most they were. They always looked the
same; their brightness was constant--not a luminous brightness, but a
mere surface glitter, just enough to rescue them from dulness. They
bored her; she despised them heartily. Other things about herself she
did not so much mind. She was glad to have her strong white teeth, to
be so very tall and not an atom weedy; she could not help thinking,
too, that she looked more like "a lady" than most working-girls.
(Marion liked to call herself a working-girl, but it annoyed her
mother.) She carried herself gallantly, and had adopted the right
manner of dress for an impoverished but undeniable gentlewoman, glad
and proud to be the hard-working secretary to a leading critic of
music--the musical drama, especially. She wore dark, well-cut coats
and skirts, and broad, low stiff white collars, and sober hats that
had not "too much surface," as her friend, Mrs. Wynne, was fond of
saying. Marion didn't know what her friend meant, yet she always
contrived to get the kind of hat.