Miss Frazier put a list of Friday’s appointments on Petra’s desk. “This is going to be a crowded day,” she said. “Here they are. The doctor won’t be able to see anybody who’s not down here, unless it is something very special, and you’ll have to decide that. Of course, they’ll all say it is very special. You’ll have to judge in spite of what they say. If you get puzzled, just tell them to telephone again later, or, if it’s somebody calling, keep them until I come out and you can ask me about it. But I think you won’t have to do either of those things. I think you’ll be perfectly able to decide anything that comes up for yourself, Petra.”

“But Janet!” They were Petra and Janet to each other—had been since the second day. “You’re throwing me in and telling me to swim. Suppose I make a mistake?”

“Well, that will be just too bad!” But Janet belied the slangy irony of the words by a quizzical accompanying smile. “It’s the way I myself began,” she said. “And after all, you have had several days now of answering telephones and talking to people here, with me right beside you. I never had any such start. Don’t worry. Just dive in. You’ll be all right. I know it.” The doctor’s buzzer had sounded and she had to hurry away to the inner sanctum.

Petra, who had only just arrived at the office, was a little late. Dick Wilder had slept last night at the Allens’ and offered to drive her into town this morning. He had, however, overslept and been late in coming for her. But that had seemed a feeble explanation when Petra offered it to Janet a minute ago and she hoped now that Doctor Pryne need not know of it. Janet, she felt sure, would not mention it unless he asked. As his door was soundproof, the chances were he did not know whether she had come late or early. He himself had been in there since eight. But she decided to depend only on the trains after this. They were never late. She wanted, with all her soul, to be as scrupulous and perfect as humanly possible in this job.

She went into the dressing room, put her hat on the shelf, powdered her face and held her wrists for a few seconds under the cold-water faucet. The papers had promised a day of record-breaking heat for June, and now, only a little after nine, the thermometer in the dressing-room window, here in the shade, registered eighty-five. Petra was not like Clare—and Shelley—elated and toned up by heat. Hot city days frightened her a little and filled her with an anticipation of some unknown but dreaded eventuality. But now that she had a real and an important job, she must be superior to this idiosyncrasy, must keep her mind clear for action and deny the childish mood.

It was not yet time for the telephone to begin its morning bombardment and she would have leisure for a little study. Getting her shorthand textbook out of its drawer, she drew pencil and paper toward her and prepared for strenuous work. Janet had been “an angel” (Petra’s expression) and constituted herself Petra’s shorthand teacher. She said that there was no reason whatever why Petra, at the end of a year’s work here, shouldn’t be prepared to take dictation from anybody, typewrite rapidly, and have a profession at her finger tips. But during this year of learning, Petra was determined to be worth every dollar that Doctor Pryne paid her. He was not her friend—he never could be now—and it must be a strictly business exchange between them and an honest one.... If you really use your brain, really concentrate, heat—even city heat—is nothing. The human brain, and the will back of it, cut through discomfort like a knife. Well, perhaps that was all that Clare meant, when she always said that hot days exhilarated her. Overcoming the wretchedness of stifling heat, being superior to it, was the exhilaration. Indeed, Petra found herself exhilarated at this moment. It was exhilarating to concentrate on these word-symbols, master them, and be of some account in the world!

But at this moment of full content—for it was content—Petra’s telephone surprisingly buzzed. Her voice—she heard it herself, answering—had an elated ring. But the voice that sounded in reply was no strange voice from the outside. It was Doctor Pryne himself, speaking to her from behind his closed door only a few yards away. He was asking her to have lunch with him at one-thirty at the Copley.

“I’m sorry. I’m lunching with Dick Wilder. I’m afraid I can’t.”

That is all she said and it was uttered with polite deliberateness. But her hand, putting down the telephone, was shaking. And this surprising phenomenon had hardly impressed itself on Petra’s attention before she was aware of the thunderous circulation of her blood.... What had so startled her body! Her employer’s voice, it seemed. But the invitation and her having to refuse it had meant very little to her conscious thinking self. Did the body have a life of its own, then,—fears and delights, even thoughts of its own? It seemed so. But she had first learned it on Saturday afternoon, when Doctor Pryne had lighted her cigarette for her. As he held the match, her body had given her this same surprise then. It had been Doctor Pryne then and it was Doctor Pryne again now. He had more significance to her, it seemed, than she herself knew. But her body knew.... It was instinct of some sort, she supposed. She was remembering one astonishing experience she had had of an animal’s instinct. It occurred the summer she had been sent to camp where there was riding. She and a few others had lost their way on the country roads and had been caught by the dark. Petra was riding ahead, loving the dark and the adventure, when suddenly her horse stopped and she felt him bristling under her. She felt his fear but stubbornly tried to urge him on. Whatever he was afraid of, they must get away from it. She was as frightened as the horse, but her desire was to plunge on and out of the situation—whatever it was. But a wiser and older girl, coming along, dismounted, walked cautiously a few yards ahead and found that a bridge was down over a deep gorge. Petra’s horse could not have seen it. Had the sound of the rushing water proclaimed no bridge above it to his sensitive ears?... But what bridge was down now? Why was her blood thundering like this and her mind at a standstill?

It passed almost as suddenly as it had come. The thundering blood sank back to the unknown and unconscious rhythms of its usual courses. But as this was Petra’s second experience only of the alert separate mind of the body, she was left strangely shaken by it. It took some effort to return her attention to the shorthand textbook, and she was glad when the telephone finally began ringing in earnest and she could put aside her self-imposed and solitary work.

For a while everything went smoothly. Petra really seemed to have an instinct for discriminating between the important and unimportant and it is certain that her magnetic young voice won instant confidence from the unseen inquirers; they felt that she would remember their requests and do her best in getting Doctor Pryne’s attention for them the first minute possible. She wrote everything down in a tidy, self-conscious hand and filed what should be filed, all the while feeling effectual and important. If the few patients waiting their turns in the little room looked at her more than at the magazines and books they pretended to be reading, she was unaware of it.

The door into the outer hall was standing wide open in the interest of all the draft possible; and so since Petra’s shoulder was turned that way, and the latest comer wore rubber-soled sneakers, she was not aware of him until he came around her desk and stood over her. The little desk, as he stood before her, leaning on it, suddenly became spindly, a mere chip, he was so large and dynamic. He was looking at Petra in surprise that she was not Janet. So she read his expression. She noticed, even in her first startled glance up at him, how blue the eyes were in his bronzed face and how the black brows over them met in a straight line across his high, straight nose. She had never seen eyes of so intense and deep a blue, she thought. They were rather like her own, had she realized it, for it was a strange coincidence, but the girl at the desk and the man bending over it might have been brother and sister. Their coloring, their physiques and their vitality were all in the same key.

The surprise in the man’s face was perhaps more like anger than surprise, after all. A sort of tortured anger, Petra thought. The intense blue of his eyes burned down at her with angry questioning. But his fine, clean-cut lips were set in a defiant line as if he meant never to speak. The thought flashed through Petra’s mind that he might be an insane patient of Doctor Pryne’s who had broken loose from confinement and was seeking out the man who had consigned him to the asylum, to shoot him. But instantly she knew it wasn’t so; the fire in the intense blue eyes was fire of intelligence burning to an expression almost as articulate as speech.

“Do you want to see Doctor Pryne?” she asked. “I am sorry but—”

She got no farther. He had reached a swift hand and snatching a letter from the top of the pile the postman had only a minute ago deposited there, turned it over and, picking up a pencil, wrote on its back, “I am dumb. Neil McCloud. No appointment. Only want to see Pryne for a minute. Will wait till he can work me in.”

Dumb! This vital creature, radiating power and strength! Petra held out her hand for the pencil. But he did not give it to her. He wrote again, the strokes of his script swift and angry, “I’m not deaf. Speak!”

“Sit down,” she said. She could not talk to him while he towered like that. It was like standing under an avalanche of physical and mental force. There was a chair close to her desk. He took it. She felt that he might mind having the other patients, who had appointments, hear him being refused one, and so she leaned toward him and explained the situation almost in a whisper. Doctor Pryne had been out of town and as a consequence was extraordinarily busy to-day. He couldn’t possibly see people without appointments, even for a minute. But next week—She took up the appointment book. The minute McCloud had written his name Petra had placed him, for on Janet’s advice she had studied and learned the names of the regular patients by heart during her first day here. She fluttered the pages of her book and came to McCloud. He had an appointment for Saturday afternoon, to-morrow. That was odd. Janet had said that Doctor Pryne kept his weekends absolutely free for his writing. But here it was in Janet’s hand—McCloud, four o’clock, June 28.

She hesitated over it. Ought she to suggest that Mr. McCloud wait for Janet’s next appearance from the inner office? This was the first time to-day that Petra had felt so uncertain of her ground. But then she decided, “No. I’m in. I must swim. That is what both Doctor Pryne and Janet expect of me. McCloud’ll have to wait for his appointment like everybody else.”—She looked across at him. Blue eyes met blue eyes, his tormented and angry, hers cool but sorry. “I’m sorry—” she began, but again he snatched at the pencil. “OK,” he almost tore it into the envelope. And then he added, underlining it, “Don’t tell him I called. I’d rather you didn’t. Back Saturday.”

Halfway to the door he swung around and came back to Petra. She handed him the pencil. He wrote—but this time in small, scrupulously clear characters—“You’re a damned beautiful girl.” She had read it easily upside down as he wrote but he was gone before the color flamed in her face.

A few minutes later, when Janet came out of the inner sanctum, trailing a patient, and went over to Petra’s desk, Petra showed her the envelope; but she had erased McCloud’s last remark. The secretary frowned. It worried her, for some reason or other. That was obvious. After a minute of brooding over it, she whispered, “I’m sorry you let him go, Petra. The doctor would have made a point of seeing Mr. McCloud. It must be something very special he wanted, really special, I mean. But you couldn’t know.... I think we’d better do what he asks and not say anything about it now to the doctor. It would bother him. I’m sorry I wasn’t here. He must have hated explaining to you about his speech. He’s morbidly sensitive about it. It was hard enough the first time he came and wrote it all down for me—but to have to do it all over again—”

So it was as bad as that! Janet’s expression even more than the words she said told Petra how serious a blunder she had made in sending McCloud away. It was so serious, in fact, that Janet wanted to protect Doctor Pryne from knowing that it had happened at all. But as to the man’s embarrassment, Petra was skeptical, remembering the sentence she had read upside down!

“But look here, Petra, don’t let this one first mistake discourage you,” Janet murmured quickly, as the doctor’s buzzer summoned her to bring in the next patient. “Go on swimming. Don’t get self-mistrustful. It’s like riding. After a spill you must get right up and mount again, or you’re queered. Better luck next time.”

At lunch Dick Wilder found Petra more bafflingly uncommunicative than usual, even, and she ate almost nothing of the very expensive and knowing meal he had ordered for her. What use was it for him to chatter on about Green Doors—and incidentally, of course, Clare—with some one who murmured back mere Yeses and Noes! The only consolation that Dick got from that luncheon hour was the overt admiration he saw in surrounding faces for his companion. These men and women had no way of knowing that his companion was as completely uninteresting as she was completely beautiful. They probably thought him much to be envied, extraordinarily lucky.

“Look here,” he said rather desperately, when he opened the door of his car to let her out in front of her office building, “let me drive you out to-night, Petra. It will be beastly going in the train in this heat.”

“Clare is giving that big dinner party to-night,” Petra reminded him. “She won’t have a minute for you. Some other night.”

But Dick persisted. He was ready to take his chances. When they got to Green Doors he would go in with Petra for a few minutes and stay talking. Clare might be around somewhere. They could exchange one word at least, one look. It would be little Sophia’s bedtime. He might be invited up to the nursery to join with little Sophia’s nurse in her role of enchanted chorus to the nightly repeated scene—the cherub’s supper hour. But he said nothing of his real designs to Petra. He merely exclaimed, “What has Clare to do with it? You’re a funny girl! It’s you I’m asking. I’ll be down here at the door at four.”

Janet’s door, the doctor’s door, the door into the public hall were all wide open when Petra got back. Janet heard her come in and sang out from the dressing room, “I’m just off for lunch, Petra. Won’t be gone twenty minutes. Too hot to eat.” Then, as Petra came up behind her, she turned from the mirror where she had been adjusting her hat and her voice changed. “You poor child! What is the matter?”

“Nothing. What should be?” Petra put away her hat and got out her compact. But Janet would not accept the nonchalant denial. “I know what’s wrong. That McCloud business. But cheer up. For months after I began this job I averaged about half a dozen mistakes a week. Nobody’s infallible. And anyway, I’ve reconsidered it. There is no real reason why that young man should consider himself an exception and come around without appointments. He did the same thing last week. And Doctor Pryne saw him and was over an hour late in leaving the office as a consequence. To-day he would probably have gone without his lunch. It’s really rather cheeky. To-day may make him see it. I myself wouldn’t have dared send him off, because I know how the doctor feels, but you didn’t know, and he only got what he deserves. So cheer up. You’re in charge now till I return. The doctor won’t be back before half-past two, probably.”

But Petra was not much comforted. Her confidence in her own adequacy had been so high only so few hours ago! And ever since the McCloud incident she had felt dashed. But how was she to know who was important, of the people who came to the office or called on the telephone, as long as they remained merely names to her in her appointment book and in the bare files in her desk. Janet, of course, knew the intimate details of all the cases. She took their “histories” down in shorthand, and even some of the conferences later, and filed them in the big steel cases in the inner office. If Petra, now, had known something of Mr. McCloud’s “history,” she might have known what to do with him this morning. But Janet, in initiating her into the work, had told her absolutely nothing of the personalities she would so soon be dealing with. Her information had confined itself strictly to names and ages. It was too great a handicap!

Besides, Petra was interested on her own account in this McCloud now. Very much so! Any one would be.... His tormented impatient look.... The way his very black brows met in a straight line over his straight high nose. She had never seen brows like that. It gave a look of dominance, of strength.... His hands were the hands of a workman, stained with oil or grease, and the fingernails were cut very short where they were not broken. Yet strangely, those hands were as expressive and impatient as his face.... And the upside-down sentence—well—that was a touch of mere deviltry. His eyes had mocked, as he pushed the envelope toward her—and was gone!

The heat in the reception office was stifling. Holding your wrists under water really didn’t help, except for the minute you were doing it. As for getting out the shorthand textbook in this lull between the morning and afternoon appointments, Petra simply couldn’t. She was smothered, dismayed by the heat. It was really a kind of drowning, this airlessness. Janet had looked so cool and superior to it. She had said, “It’s torrid, isn’t it!” but she hadn’t minded it really. She had created the effect, even as she mentioned it, of brushing mere physical discomfort from her clear, cool self as if it were a fly.

There was, however, a slight breeze coming through from Doctor Pryne’s big windows. A paper on his desk rustled intermittently. It might blow off. Petra decided to go in there and put a book or an inkwell, some solid object, on it. But when she had secured the object—a package of Luckies, as it happened—she turned away from the desk to the steel filing case across the room and stood looking at it curiously. She could read the letters on the faces of the boxes from where she stood.