Twain's End by Lynn Cullen Page B

contact. “You looked pretty interested.”
    Even in the shade of the cab’s interior, she could feel the intensityof his eyes. Although she would not look into them, she knew exactly their color: gray, with a tendency to soft green when he was happy. She yearned to see if they were soft green now. “No. But thank you.”
    â€œJust as well.” He pulled a cigar from his coat, then fished a match from his pocket. “You could lose your virtue out there.”
    Isabel acted as if she had not heard.
    He struck his match against the sole of his shoe and watched her as he lit a cigar. “The wind whips around that devil’s flatiron like a Missouri cyclone”—he puffed as he waved out the match—“wreaking the most awful havoc on the ladies’ skirts. It has gotten so that a squadron of policemen has to patrol the sidewalks around it. Any casual ‘scientist’ who makes too close a study of the effect of wind on skirts is told, ‘Twenty-three skidoo,’ and gets familiarized with the street out front of that number.”
    Isabel glanced through the netting hanging over the edge of her hat. “I don’t believe you. You’re making that up.”
    â€œNow, Lioness, I thought I had trained you better than that. What do I say about stories that sound like whoppers?”
    â€œâ€Šâ€˜The more it sounds like a whopper, the truer it is.’ ”
    â€œGood girl. You’ll make a fine secretary yet.”
    She laughed. She was thirty-nine, and he made her feel like a girl. “I am trying.”
    â€œTry harder. Rogers thinks he’s got the best secretary in the world. I want to make him jealous.”
    â€œI’ll do my best, but I am just your wife’s social secretary.”
    â€œThe hell you are. I have purloined you from Livy, and now you’ve got to make me look good. Why do you think I hired you?”
    â€œI thought I was Mrs. Clemens’s employee.”
    â€œHave you ever talked with her?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThen how could she have hired you? I’m the one who wanted you. Those card games we had were the last I had a good time, the last I felt in charge, before”—he scowled—“before everything wentto hell.” He knit his warlike brows. “I’m counting on you to take me back to those happier days. I want you to sail me back there. You think you can do that for me, Lioness?”
    â€œI’ll try.” She meant it. She’d do anything for him.
    He squeezed her hand. “That’s my girl.”
    They joggled south down Broadway, a private bubble of camaraderie surrounding them as their cab navigated the sea of machines, horses, and people. At last, past City Hall, past St. Paul’s Chapel, past Trinity Church, they arrived at an elegant skyscraper several blocks short of the base of the island. In spite of its prominence above its neighbors, the Standard Oil Building, with its eleven white stone stories, was marked solely with a black 26 between the massive columns of its entrance. A trip across the marble tomb of a lobby and then skyward in a brass elevator cage took them to the stronghold of the person against whom Mr. Clemens had pitted her: Katherine Harrison, secretary to Henry H. Rogers, the ranking director of the Standard Oil Company.
    Wearing an expression that she hoped struck the right note between serenity and seriousness, Isabel gaped inwardly as Miss Harrison led the way to Mr. Rogers’s quarters. At over six feet in height, Miss Harrison towered over Mr. Clemens. The top of Isabel’s voluminous hat didn’t reach the bottom of her shoulder blades. Miss Harrison had outfitted her Amazonian figure in a man’s shirt and coat over a tailored skirt and had pulled back her dark blond hair in a severe bun. She was said to be the best secretary in the world and was certainly the best paid. At ten thousand dollars a year, she made