He made it a rule, sensibly, to keep his door open as much as possible, even when he was dictating, sometimes not.

It was in these half-hours of dictation--the door open, as a rule, for he did not care for too much privacy--that he and Miss Nowak came closest.

After months and months, and because he had been busy with the other woman mentioned, of whom she knew nothing, she came to enter sometimes with a sense of suffocation, sometimes of maidenly shame.

It would never have occurred to her to admit frankly that she wanted Cowperwood to make love to her.

It would have frightened her to have thought of herself as yielding easily, and yet there was not a detail of his personality that was not now burned in her brain.