Stories by Doris Lessing Page A

want to think about it; and besides, with Marnie there everything was changed. After one morning there was a different feeling in the office.
    She was a girl of eighteen from some little dorp miles away, the youngest of ten children. She had a small plump, fresh face that always had a look of delighted expectation, and a shrill; expressive voice, and was as slim and as quick as a fish. She darted about the place, talking to the staff as if it had never entered her head anyone in the world could not be pleased to waste his time on her account. She shattered the sacred silence of the main office with her gossip about her family; sat on the desks and swung her legs; put vases of flowers among the telephones. And even Miss Ives took off her glasses and watched her. They all watched her; and particularly Mr. Jones, who made plenty of excuses to leave his desk, with the indulgent, amused, faintly ironic smile with which one looks at children, remembering what all that fearlessness and charm is going to come to. As for Mr. Brooke, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. For a while he was afraid to speak, for Marnie, like the others, seemed not to know he was there; and when he did, she looked at him with startled distaste, a look he was used to, though it in no way corresponded with what he felt about himself. She might be my daughter, he said to himself defensively; and he used to ask her with whom she ate lunch, what picture she had seen the night before, as a jealous lover can’t resist talking about his mistress, feeling that even to speak about what she has been doing robs it of its danger, makes the extraordinary and wonderful life she leads apart from him in some way his. But Marnie answered shortly, or not at all, wrinkling up her nose.
    Even that he found attractive. What was so charming about her was her directness, the simplicity of her responses. She knew nothing of the secret sycophancy of the office that made the typists speak to Mr. Jones in one voice and Miss Ives in another. She treated everyone as if she had known them always. She was as confiding as a child, read her letters out loud, jumped with joy when parcels came from home, and wept when someone suggested gently that there were better ways of doing her work.
    For she was catastrophically inefficient. She was supposed to learn filing; but in actual fact she made the tea, slipped overto the teashop across the road ten times a day for cream cakes, and gave people advice about their colds or how to make their dresses.
    The other typists, who were, after all, her natural enemies, were taken by surprise and treated her with the tenderest indulgence. It was because it occurred to no one that she could last out the first month. But Miss Ives made out her second paycheck, which was very generous, with a grim face, and snubbed her until she cried.
    It was Miss Ives, who was afraid of nothing, who at last walked into Mr. Jones’s office and said that the child was impossible and must leave at once. As it was, the files would take months to get straight. No one could find anything.
    She came back to her desk looking grimmer than ever, her lips twitching.
    She said angrily, “I’ve kept myself for twenty-seven years this March. I’ve never had anything. How many women have the qualifications I have? I should have had a pretty face.” And then she burst into tears. It was mild hysterics. Mr. Brooke was the first to fuss around with water and handkerchiefs. No one had ever seen Miss Ives cry.
    And what about? All Mr. Jones had said was that Marnie was the daughter of an old school friend and he had promised to look after her. If she was no good at filing, then she must be given odd jobs.
    “Is this an office or a charitable institution?” demanded Miss Ives. Tve never seen anything like this, never.” And then she turned to Mr. Brooke, who was leaning ineffectually over her, and said, “There are other people who should go too. I suppose he was a friend of your