Mrs. Athelstone proceeded to question him at some length about his
qualifications. When he had satisfied her that he was competent to
attend to the easy, clerical work of the office and to care for the
more valuable articles in the hall, things which she did not care to
leave to the regular cleaners, she concluded:
"I'm disposed to give you a trial, Mr. Simpkins, but I want you to
understand that under no circumstances are you to talk about me or
your work outside the office. I've been so hunted and harried by
reporters----" And her voice broke. "What I want above all else is
a clerk that I can trust."
The assurance which Simpkins gave in reply came harder than all the lies
he had told that morning, and, some way, none of them had slipped out
so smoothly as usual. He was a fairly truthful and tender-hearted man
outside his work, but in it he had accustomed himself to regard men and
women in a purely impersonal way, and their troubles and scandals simply
as material. To his mind, nothing was worth while unless it had a news
value; and nothing was sacred that had. But he was uneasily conscious
now that he was doing a deliberately brutal thing, and for the first
time he felt that regard for a subject's feelings which is so fatal to
success in certain branches of the new journalism.
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