Meeting At The Exchange
I had supposed, after the visit to Paultons Square, that Holmes would allow some days to elapse before the next move. I had underestimated, as I so often did, the particular impatience that took hold of him whenever a case had acquired what he would have called its centre of gravity. He was up before me the next morning, had left the house before Mrs. Hudson had brought the tea, and had returned by ten with an envelope in his hand, and the expression of a man who has, against considerable odds, obtained an interview.
"We are to go to the Central Telegraph Office at two o'clock," he said. "The interview has been granted on the understanding that we are there upon a matter connected with a stolen cable, the particulars of which I have invented and which we shall not be required to discuss. You will oblige me by being present, and by saying nothing during the first five minutes."
The Central Telegraph Office in St. Martin's-le-Grand is, in its way, one of the wonders of modern London, and I had not been inside it before. The public hall was a vast echoing room in which several hundred persons stood at sloped desks writing out their telegrams with the concentration of communicants, while behind a counter of polished oak a double row of male and female clerks — the women in dark dresses and the neat white collars peculiar to the service — received the forms and despatched them by