ever, without being stirred
by a feeling which was not of her own willing. He fascinated and
suffused her with a dull fire. She sometimes wondered whether a man so
remarkable would ever be interested in a girl like her.

The end of this essential interest, of course, was the eventual
assumption of Antoinette. One might go through all the dissolving
details of days in which she sat taking dictation, receiving
instructions, going about her office duties in a state of apparently
chill, practical, commercial single-mindedness; but it would be to no
purpose. As a matter of fact, without in any way affecting the
preciseness and accuracy of her labor, her thoughts were always upon
the man in the inner office--the strange master who was then seeing his
men, and in between, so it seemed, a whole world of individuals, solemn
and commercial, who came, presented their cards, talked at times almost
interminably, and went away. It was the rare individual, however, she
observed, who had the long conversation with Cowperwood, and that
interested her the more. His instructions to her were always of the
briefest, and he depended on her native intelligence to supply much
that he scarcely more than suggested.

"You understand, do you?" was his customary phrase.

"Yes," she would reply.

She felt as though she were fifty times as significant here as she had
ever been in her life before.

The office was clean, hard, bright, like Cowperwood himself. The
morning sun, streaming in through an almost solid glass east front
shaded by pale-green roller curtains, came to have an almost romantic
atmosphere for her. Cowperwood's private office, as in Philadelphia,
was a solid cherry-wood box in which he could shut himself
completely--sight-proof, sound-proof. When the door was closed it was
sacrosanct. He made it a rule, sensibly, to keep his door open as much
as possible, even when he was dictating, sometimes not. It was in
these half-hours of dictation--the door open, as a rule, for he did not
care for too much privacy--that he and Miss Nowak came closest. After
months and months, and because he had been busy with the other woman
mentioned, of whom she knew nothing, she came to enter sometimes with a
sense of suffocation, sometimes of maidenly shame. It would never have
occurred to her to admit frankly that she wanted Cowperwood to make
love to her. It would have frightened her to have thought of herself
as yielding easily, and y