the workroom, crackingjokes. "I see myself in a maternal role, really," she says in a low voice. "Miss Jennings here, for instance, is only thirteen; apprenticed by the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb."
"Awfully kind of you," remarks the colonel.
Fido shakes her head. "She's been rather more trouble to train, but wonderfully immune to distraction."
"Oh, but you have the coarser sex here too," Helen mutters, catching sight of Mr. Kettle chalking his hands.
"Well, of course there are tasks beyond the average girl's strength," says Fido a little defensively. "Carrying the type cases, feeding and striking off the sheets ... So I hire one male clicker to oversee each company of five typos: he distributes copy, makes up the girls' work into columns and imposes the matter—puts the pages in the right order," she glosses. "But I'm proud to say I employ twenty-five girls here and fifteen at Farringdon Street."
Helen is hanging back, looking at the long racks covered with iron frames. "They're known as chases" says Fido, at her elbow, "but when they're filled with type and secured we call themformes." It occurs to her that she's being a bore. "Miss Clark is setting up a line at a time on a composing stick—if I may, Miss Clark—it's adjustable in width, you see." She offers the stick to Helen.
She pulls back. "I mustn't get stained; Harry and I dine at the Beechams' tonight."
Anderson chuckles. "There's no ink on it yet, Mrs. C."
That name has jarred on Fido's ear each time he's used it. Too vulgar, or too presuming? It sounds like something a butcher might call his wife. She tells herself not to be such a snob; military circles have their own jargon. "Everything's thoroughly scrubbed after each print run," she assures Helen. "The trade absolutely depends on hygiene and order." How pompous I sound, how elderly, at twenty-nine.
"You'd never take me on, Fido," Helen remarks. "Far too disorderly, not to mention too plump in the fingers."
"Your fingers are irrelevant, but your character would be an obstacle," Fido agrees, loosening into laughter.
She offers them tea in her office.
"Aha, Tennyson, capital." Anderson points his cane's silver tip at a framed verse on the wall and recites:
Give every flying minute
Something to keep in store:
Work, for the night is coming,
When man works no more.
Fido smiles slightly. "In fact, the poet's a Miss Anna Walker."
Helen smiles at his discomfiture.
"Rather in the laureate's manner, though," ventures Anderson after a second.
Over shrimps and bread and butter, it emerges that some of Fido's Scottish connections are acquainted with some of the colonel's.
"This establishment is a great credit to you, Miss Faithfull," he tells her.
"Yet we've had our enemies," she says, theatrically.
Helen stops chewing a large shrimp.
Aha, that's hooked her. "Ceaseless sabotage, in the early days," says Fido. "Windows smashed, frames and stools daubed in ink to destroy the hands' dresses, sorts jumbled up in their cases or scattered like birdseed, machines prised apart with crowbars ... the waste was simply ruinous, quite apart from the distress caused."
"My dear, how sensational," cries Helen.
Strange how a few years can reduce humiliation to an anecdote. "There were scurrilous attacks on me in the journals; I had to grow a rhinoceros's hide. But the Victoria Press was self-supporting in a year, I was honoured with Her Majesty's approval, and now we win medals for excellence from the International Exhibition." Well, one medal. In her attempt to impress her old friend, Fido's getting carried away.
"Bravissima," cries Helen, clapping her hands. "And to think, when I first knew you, it was four costumes a day and routs at Lady Morgan's."
Fido laughs. "I'm afraid we were a wild pair, my soi-disant chaperone and I," she tells Anderson.
"We had a policy of dancing with anything in trousers that asked us," contributes Helen.
"And made facile and impertinent remarks, in the name of youthful artless-ness. You, as the married lady, should have reined me in."
"Ah, but Fido's always been my better self," Helen tells Anderson. "And look at her now, how she's transformed herself from deb to philanthropist..."
"Miss Faithfull, on that theme," he asks playfully, "wouldn't you admit that some of your woman-ist set want to go too far?"
Fido arranges her smile. (It's little by little that the world will be changed, she reminds herself, as mice nibble a hole in a wall.) "I assure you, Colonel, we don't mean to smash the social machine, only to readjust its workings."
"But one hears of calls for women judges, MPs, officers—"
"Oh, if any argument's pushed ad absurdum..." Fido controls