Come on in."
Then he went to his desk and reached under it, snapping off a switch.
As he straightened, the door from the reception-office opened and
his secretary, Kathie O'Grady, entered, loading a cigarette into an
eight-inch amber holder. She was a handsome woman, built on the generous
lines of a Renaissance goddess; none of the Renaissance masters, however,
had ever employed a model so strikingly Hibernian. She had blue eyes, and
a fair, highly-colored complexion; she wore green, which went well with
her flaming red hair, and a good deal of gold costume-jewelry.
Behind her came Dave Ritter. He was Rand's assistant, and also Kathie's
lover. He was five or six years older than his employer, and slightly
built. His hair, fighting a stubborn rearguard action against baldness,
was an indeterminate mousy gray-brown. It was one of his professional
assets that nobody ever noticed him, not even in a crowd of one; when he
wanted it to, his thin face could assume the weary, baffled expression of
a middle-aged book-keeper with a wife and four children on fifty dollars
a week. Actually, he drew three times that much, had no wife, admitted to
no children. During the war, he and Kathie had kept the Tri-State Agency
in something better than a state of suspended animation while Rand had
been in the Army.
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