Wednesday, he appreciated, was not the person to go in for such counterattacks. She was rolling her lips distressedly against each other and trying to think of a polite, good-employee way out. There was only one, and she would have to come to it in a moment.

She did.

“Would it help any,” she began, and stopped. She took a deep breath. “Would it help any, if I told you the reasons—for the leaves-of-absence?”

“It would,” he said heartily. “It would indeed, Miss Gresham. That way I, as office manager, can operate from facts instead of mysteries. I can hear your reasons, weigh them for validity and measure their importance—and your usefulness as a secretary—against the disorganization your absences create in the day-to-day operation of Slaughter, Stark and Slingsby.”

“M-m-m.” She looked troubled, uncertain. “I’d like to think a bit, if you don’t mind.”

Fabian waved a cauliflower-filled fork magnanimously. “Take all the time in the world! Think it out carefully. Don’t tell me anything you aren’t perfectly willing to tell me. Of course anything you do tell me will be, I am sure I need hardly reassure you, completely confidential. I will treat it as official knowledge, Miss Gresham—not personal. And while you’re thinking, you might start eating your raw cabbage. Before it gets cold,” he added with a rich, executive-type chuckle.

She nodded him a half-smile that ended in a sigh and began working at her plate in an absent-minded, not-particularly-hungry fashion.

“You see,” she began abruptly as if she’d found a good point of departure, “some things happen to me that don’t happen to other people.”

“That, I would say, is fairly obvious.”

“They’re not bad things. I mean what, oh, the newspapers would call bad. And they’re not dangerous things, exactly. They’re—they’re more physical-like. They’re things that could happen to my body.”