But Bunner, who knew that there was a possibility that even a beautiful young woman might not enjoy losing her job, could not dismiss the matter from his mind until the interview with her was over. He decided, therefore, to hold it at once, and withdrew from the president's room, where, as a directors' meeting was about to take place, the members of the board were already beginning to gather.
Bunner was a pale fat man of forty, who was as cold to the excessive emotion of the third vice president as he was to the inconvenient beauty which had caused it. He paused beside Miss Leavitt's desk in the outer office and requested a moment of her time.
She had finished going over the article on Corals and was about to begin that on Coronach--a Scotch dirge or lamentation for the dead.
She had just been wondering whether any created being would, ever want to know anything about coronach, when Mr. Bunner spoke to her. If she had followed her first impulse she would have looked up and beamed at him, for she was of the most friendly and warmhearted nature; but she remembered that beaming was not safe where men were concerned—even when they were fat and forty--so she answered coldly, "Yes, Mr. Bunner," and rose and followed him to his own little office.
Miss Pearl Leavitt, A. B., Rutland College, was not one of those beauties who must be pointed out to you before you