This Marrying by Margaret Culkin Banning

The blue of the lake had faded into grey -- a grey that looked thick and heavy and that lay impassive under the blasting sunlight. Its coolness was gone and its vigor. Above, in _The Journal_ office, where the shades were drawn down to keep out the heat, the vigor seemed gone too. The machinery went on smoothly enough. At Horatia's desk a young woman, fresh from a New York school of journalism, was typing an excellent article on what suffrage had done in the recent campaign. At the surrounding desks the reporters struck off brief histories of automobile accidents, police raids, city happenings. In Langley's room, the pale little stenographer took dictation as he walked up and down and worked out his editorials. There were editorials on the street car franchise, that hardy perennial in city problems, on the new appointment of the city planning commission, on the latest foreign tangle, on the eternal disentangling of the knot of political complications at Washington. Clearcut and well-phrased, his words came on each subject, so that the stenographer hurried to keep up with the flow of his thought, and yet something intangible had gone out of his thinking as out of the office atmosphere. The office was no longer a place of romance -- an adventure -- a laboratory in which to solve world problems -- a crusade against corruption as it had been for the past six months. It was a work-shop, a clean, orderly work-shop -- and that was all. They all missed Horatia. During the first week of her absence Bob Brotherton had a maddening way of calling constant attention to it and bewailing it. He needed her for this and for that and he said facetiously that there was no use in sprucing himself up any more. No one cared for him and he would wear old clothes until she came back.

Jim had not realized how much Horatia meant to the staff. His own devotion to her had been so absorbing that he had not noticed the relations of the others. Now a stream of comments about her seemed to be floating about the office all day long. To excuse her outrageously long and indefinite vacation he had been compelled to say that she was not well and the staff felt a shadow over them. They were forever finding things in the day's work which would have amused Horatia, forever recalling this or that incident which had amused her, forever wishing she were back. Langley alone did not comment on her, but Bob would say wisely when a particularly caustic comment came out of the inner office, "He's not himself. He misses the young lady. He's a different man when she's around."