I went out.
In the outer office was a very old man on a stool writing slowly and laboriously, a small, cheeky-looking boy and a middle-aged woman with frizzy hair and pince-nez who was typing with some speed and dash.
If this was Miss Ginch I agreed with Owen Griffith that tender passages between her and her employer were exceedingly unlikely.
I went into the baker's and said my piece about the currant loaf.
It was received with the exclamations and incredulity proper to the occasion, and a new currant loaf was thrust upon me in replacement - "fresh from the oven this minute" - as its indecent heat pressed against my chest proclaimed to be no less than truth.
I came out of the shop and looked up and down the street, hoping to see Joanna with the car.
The walk had tired me a good deal and it was awkward getting along with my sticks and the currant loaf.
But there was no sign of Joanna as yet.
Suddenly my eyes were held in glad and incredulous surprise.
Along the pavement toward me there came floating a goddess.
There is really no other word for it.
The perfect features, the crisply curling golden hair, the tall exquisitely shaped body.
And she walked like a goddess, without effort, seeming to swim nearer and nearer.
A glorious, an incredible, a breath-taking girl!
In my intense excitement something had to go.
What went was the currant loaf.
It slipped from my clutches.
I made a dive after it and lost my stick, which clattered to the pavement, and I slipped and nearly fell myself.
It was the strong arm of the goddess that caught and held me.
I began to stammer:
"Th-thanks awfully, I'm f-f-frightfully sorry."
She had retrieved the currant loaf and handed it to me together with the stick.
And then she smiled kindly and said cheerfully:
"Don't mention it.
No trouble, I assure you," and the magic died completely before the flat, competent voice.
A nice, healthy-looking, well set-up girl; no more.
I fell to reflecting what would have happened if the gods had given Helen of Troy exactly those flat accents.
How strange that a girl could trouble your inmost soul so long as she kept her mouth shut, and that the moment she spoke the glamor could vanish as though it had never been.
I had known the reverse happen, though.
I had seen a little sad monkey-faced woman whom no one would turn to look at twice. Then she had opened her mouth and suddenly enchantment had lived and bloomed and Cleopatra had cast her spell anew.
Joanna had drawn up at the curb beside me without my noticing her arrival.
She asked if there was anything the matter.
"Nothing," I said, pulling myself together.
"I was reflecting on Helen of Troy and others."
"What a funny place to do it," said Joanna.
"You looked most odd, standing there clasping currant bread to your breast with your mouth wide open."
"I've had a shock," I said.
"I had been transplanted to Ilium and back again."
I added, indicating a retreating back that was swimming gracefully away: "Do you know who that is?"
Peering after the girl Joanna said that it was Elsie Holland, the Symmington's nursery governess.
"Is that what struck you all of a heap?" she asked.
"She's good-looking, but a bit of a wet fish."
"I know," I said.
"Just a nice kind girl.
And I'd been thinking her Aphrodite." Joanna opened the door of the car and I got in.
"It's funny, isn't it?" she said.
"Some people have lots of looks and absolutely no S. A.
That girl hasn't.
It seems such a pity."
I said that if she was a nursery governess it was probably just as well.