Bread

by Charles G. Norris

BREAD

CHAPTER I

§ 1

“One and two and three and four and—one and two and three and four and....”

Mrs. Sturgis had a way of tapping the ivory keys of the piano with her pencil when she was counting the beat during a music lesson. It made her little pupils nervous and sometimes upset them completely. Now she abruptly interrupted herself and rapped the keys sharply.

“Mildred, dearie—it doesn’t go that way at all; the quarter note is on ‘three.’ It’s one and two and three and.... You see?”

“Mama.” A tall dark girl stood in the doorway of the room.

Mrs. Sturgis affected not to hear and drew a firm circle with her pencil about the troublesome quarter note. There was another insistent demand from the door. Mrs. Sturgis twisted about and leaned back on the piano bench so that Mildred’s thin little figure might not obstruct the view of her daughter. Her air was one of martyred resignation but she smiled indulgently. Very sweetly she said:

“Yes, dearie?” Jeannette recognized the tone as one her mother used to disguise annoyance.

“It’s quarter to six....” Jeannette left the sentence unfinished. She hoped her mother would guess the rest, but Mrs. Sturgis only smiled more sweetly and looked expectant.

“There’s no bread,” Jeannette then said bluntly.

Mrs. Sturgis’ expression did not change nor did she ease her constrained position.

“Well, dearie ... the delicatessen shop is open. Perhaps you or Alice can run down to Kratzmer’s and get a loaf.”

“But we can’t do that, Mama.” There was a note of exasperation in the girl’s voice; she looked hard at her mother and frowned.

“Ah....” Mrs. Sturgis gave a short gasp of understanding. Kratzmer had been owed a little account for some time and the fat German had suggested that his bills be settled more promptly.

“My purse is there, dearie”; she indicated the shabby imitation leather bag on the table. Then with a renewal of her alert smile she returned to the lesson.

“One and two and three and four and—one and two and——”

“Mama, I’m sorry to interrupt....”

Mrs. Sturgis now turned a glassy eye upon her older child, and the patient smile she tried to assume was hardly more than a grimace. It was eloquent of martyrdom.

“I’m sorry to have to interrupt,” Jeannette repeated, “but there isn’t any money in your purse; it’s empty.”

The expression on her mother’s face did not alter but the light died in her eyes. Jeannette realized she had grasped the situation at last.

“Well ... dearie....” Mrs. Sturgis began.

Jeannette stood uncompromisingly before her. She had no suggestion to offer; her mother might have foreseen they would need bread for dinner.

The little music-teacher continued to study her daughter, but presently her gaze drifted to Mildred beside her perched on a pile of music albums.

“You haven’t a dime or a nickel with you, dearie?” she asked the child. “I could give you credit on your bill and your papa, you see, could pay ten cents less next time he sends me a check....”

“I think I got thome money,” lisped Mildred, wriggling down from her seat and investigating the pocket of her jacket which lay near on a chair. “Mother alwath givth me money when I goeth out.” She drew forth a small plush purse and dumped the contents into her hand. “I got twenty thenth,” she announced.

“Well, I’ll just help myself to ten of it,” said Mrs. Sturgis, bending forward and lifting one of the small coins with delicate finger-tips. “You tell your papa I’ll give him credit on this bill.”

She turned to Jeannette and held out the coin.

“Here, lovie; get a little Graham, too.”

There was color in the girl’s face as she accepted the money; she drew up her shoulders slightly, but without comment, turned upon her heel and left the room.

Mrs. Sturgis brought her attention once more cheerfully back to the lesson.

“Now then, Mildred dearie: one and two and three and four and—one and two and three and four and.... Now you have it; see how easy that is?”

§ 2

Jeannette passed through the dark intervening rooms of the apartment, catching up her shabby velvet hat from her bed, and came upon her sister Alice in the kitchen.

There was a marked contrast between the two girls. Jeannette, who was several months past her eighteenth birthday, was a tall, willowy girl with a smooth olive-tinted skin, dark eyes, brows and lashes, and straight, lustreless braids of hair almost dead black. She gave promise of beauty in a year or two,—of austere stateliness,—but now she appeared rather angular and ungainly with her thin shoulders and shapeless ankles. She was too tall and too old to be still dressed like a schoolgirl. Alice was only a year her junior, but Alice looked younger. She was softer, rounder, gentler. She had brown hair, brown eyes and a brown skin. “My little brown bird,” her mother had called her as a child. She was busy now at the stove, dumping and scraping out a can of tomatoes into a saucepan. Dinner was in process of preparation. Steam poured from the nozzle of the kettle on the gas range and evaporated in a thin cloud.

“Mama makes me so mad!” Jeannette burst out indignantly. “I wish she wouldn’t be borrowing money from the pupils! She just got ten cents out of Mildred Carpenter.”

She displayed the diminutive coin in her palm. Alice regarded it with a troubled frown.

“It makes me so sick,” went on Jeannette, “wheedling a dime out of a baby like that! I don’t believe it’s necessary, at least Mama ought to manage better. Just think of it! Borrowing money to buy a loaf of bread! ... We’ve come to a pretty state of things.”

“Aw—don’t, Janny,” Alice remonstrated; “you know how hard Mama tries and how people won’t pay their bills.... The Cheneys have owed eighty-six dollars for six months and it never occurs to them we need it so badly.”

“I’d go and get it, if I was Mama,” Jeannette said with determination, putting on her hat and bending her tall figure awkwardly to catch her reflection in a lower pane of the kitchen door. “I wouldn’t stand it. I’d call on old Paul G. Cheney at his office and tell him he’d have to pay up or find someone else to teach his children!”

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t, Janny!—You know that’d never do. Paul and Dorothy have been taking lessons off Mama for nearly three years. Mama’d lose all her pupils if she did things like that.”

“Well—” Jeannette drawled, suddenly weary of the discussion and opening the kitchen door into the hall, “I’m going down to Kratzmer’s.”

§ 3

In the delicatessen store she was obliged to wait her turn. The shop was well filled with late customers, and the women especially seemed maddeningly dilatory to the impatient girl.

“An’ fifteen cents’ worth of ham ... an’ some of that chow-chow ... and a box of crackers....”

Jeannette studied the rows of salads, pots of baked beans, the pickled pig’s-feet, and sausages. Everything looked appetizing to her, and the place smelled fragrantly of fresh cold meat and creamy cheeses. Most of the edibles Kratzmer offered so invitingly, she had never tasted. She would have liked to begin at one end of the marble counter and sample everything that was on it. She looked curiously at the woman near her who had just purchased some weird-looking, pickled things called “mangoes,” and gone on selecting imported cheeses and little oval round cans with French and Italian labels upon them. Jeannette wondered if she, herself, would ever come to know a time when she could order of Kratzmer so prodigally. She was sick of the everlasting struggle at home of what they should get for lunch or dinner. It was always determined by the number of cents involved.

“Well, dearie,” her mother invariably remonstrated at some suggestion of her own, “that would cost thirty cents and perhaps it would be wiser to wait until next week.”

A swift, vague vision arose of the vital years that were close at hand,—the vital years in which she must marry and decide the course of her whole future life. Was her preparation for this all-important time ever to be beset by a consideration of pennies and makeshifts?

“Vell, Miss Sturgis, vat iss it to-night?”

Fat Mrs. Kratzmer smiled blandly at her over the glass shelf above the marble counter. Jeannette watched her as she deftly crackled thin paper about the two loaves, tied and snapped the pink string. Kratzmer and his wife were fat with big stomachs and round, double chins; even Elsa Kratzmer, their daughter, who went to the High School with Jeannette and Alice, was fat and had a double chin. The family had probably all they wanted to eat and a great deal more; there must be an enormous amount of food left on the platters and dishes and in the pans at the end of each day that would spoil before morning. Kratzmer, his wife and daughter must gormandize, stuff themselves night after night, Jeannette reflected as she began to climb the four long flights of stairs to her own apartment. It was disgusting, of course, to think of eating that way,—but oh, what a feast she and Alice would have if they might change places with the trio for a night or two!

As she reached the second landing, a thick smell of highly seasoned frying food assailed her. This was the floor on which the Armenians lived, and a pungent odor from their cooking frequently permeated the entire building. The front door of their apartment was open and as Jeannette was passing it, Dikron Najarian came out. He was a tall young man of twenty-three or-four, of extraordinary swarthy beauty, with black wavy masses of hair, and enormous dark eyes. He and his sister, Rosa,—she was a few years older and equally handsome,—often met the young Sturgis girls on the stairs or fumbling with the key to the mail-box in the entrance-way below. Jeannette and Alice used to giggle sillily after they had encountered Dikron, and would exchange ridiculous confidences concerning him. They regarded the young man as far too old to be interested in either of themselves and therefore took his unusual beauty and odd, foreign manner as proper targets for their laughter.

Jeannette now instinctively straightened herself as she encountered her neighbor. Upon the instant a feminine challenge emanated from her.

“Hello,” Dikron said, taken unawares and obviously embarrassed. “Been out?”

For some obscure reason Jeannette did not understand, she elected at that moment to coquet. She had never given the young Armenian a serious thought before, but now she became aware of the effect their sudden encounter had had upon him. She paused on the lower step of the next flight and hung for a moment over the balustrade. Airily, she explained her errand to Kratzmer’s.

“What smells so good?” she asked presently.

She thought the odor abominable, but it did not suit her mood to say so.

“Mother’s cooking mussels to-night; they’re wonderful, stuffed with rice and peppers.... Have you ever tasted them? Could I send some upstairs?”

Jeannette laughed hastily, and shook her head.

“No—no,—thanks very much.... I’m afraid we wouldn’t....” She was going to say “appreciate them” but left the sentence unfinished. “I must go on up; Mother’s waiting for the bread.”

But she made no immediate move, and the young man continued to lean against the wall below her. Their conversation, however, died dismally at this point, and after a moment’s uncomfortable silence, the girl began nimbly to mount the stairs, flinging over her shoulder a somewhat abrupt “Good-night.”

§ 4

“Get your bread, dearie?” Mrs. Sturgis asked cheerfully as Jeannette came panting into the kitchen and flung her package down upon the table. Her daughter did not answer but dropped into a chair to catch her breath.

Mrs. Sturgis was bustling about, pottering over the gas stove, stirring a saucepan of stewing kidneys, banging shut the oven door after a brief inspection of a browning custard. Alice had just finished setting the table in the dining-room, and now came in, to break the string about the bread and begin to slice it vigorously. Jeannette interestedly observed what they were to have for dinner. It was one of the same old combinations with which she was familiar, and a feeling of weary distaste welled up within her, but a glimpse of her mother’s face checked it.

Mrs. Sturgis invariably wore lace jabots during the day. These were high-collared affairs, reinforced with wires or whalebones, and they fastened firmly around the throat, the lace falling in rich, frothy cascades at the front. They were the only extravagance the hard-working little woman allowed herself, and she justified them on the ground that they were becoming and she must be presentable at the fashionable girls’ school where she was a teacher, and also at Signor Bellini’s studio where she was the paid accompanist. Jeannette and Alice were always mending or ironing these frills, and had become extremely expert at the work. There was a drawer in their mother’s bureau devoted exclusively to her jabots, and her daughters made it their business to see that one of these lacy adornments was always there, dainty and fresh, ready to be put on. Beneath the brave show of lace about her neck and over the round swell of her small compact bosom, there was only her “little old black” or “the Macy blue.” Mrs. Sturgis had no other garments and these two dresses were unrelievedly plain affairs with plain V-shaped necks and plain, untrimmed skirts. The jabots gave the effect of elegance she loved, and she had a habit of flicking the lacy ruffles as she talked, straightening them or tossing them with a careless finger. The final touch of adornment she allowed herself was two fine gold chains about her neck. From the longer was suspended her watch which she carried tucked into the waist-band of her skirt; while the other held her eye-glasses which, when not in use, hung on a hook at her shoulder.

The tight lace collars creased and wrinkled her throat, and made her cheeks bulge slightly over them, giving her face a round full expression. When she was excited and wagged her head, or when she laughed, her fat little cheeks shook like cups of jelly. But as soon as her last pupil had departed for the day, off came the gold chains and the jabot. She was more comfortable without the confining band about her neck though her real reason for laying her lacy ruffles aside was to keep them fresh and unrumpled. Stripped of her frills, her daughters were accustomed to see her in the early mornings, and evenings, with the homely V-shaped garment about her withered neck, her cheeks, lacking the support of the tight collar, sagging loosely. Habit was strong with Mrs. Sturgis. Jeannette and Alice were often amused at seeing their mother still flicking and tossing with an unconscious finger an imaginary frill long after it had been laid aside.

Now as the little woman bent over the stove, her older daughter noted the pendant cheeks criss-crossed with tiny purplish veins, the blue-white wrinkled neck, and the vivid red spots beneath the ears left by the sharp points of wire in the high collar she had just unfastened. There were puffy pockets below her eyes, and even the eyelids were creased with a multitude of tiny wrinkles. Jeannette realized her mother was tired—unusually tired. She remembered, too, that it was Saturday, and on Saturday there were pupils all day long. The girl jumped to her feet, snatched the stirring spoon out of her mother’s hand and pushed her away from the range.

“Get out of here, Mama,” she directed vigorously. “Go in to the table and sit down. Alice and I will put dinner on.... Alice, make Mama go in there and sit down.”

Mrs. Sturgis laughingly protested but she allowed her younger daughter to lead her into the adjoining room where she sank down gratefully in her place at the table.

“Well, lovies, your old mother is pretty tired....” She drew a long breath of contentment and closed her eyes.

The girls poured the kidney stew into an oval dish and carried it and the scalloped tomatoes to the table. There was a hurried running back and forth for a few minutes, and then Jeannette and Alice sat down, hunching their chairs up to the table, and began hungrily to eat. It was the most felicitous, unhurried hour of their day usually, for mother and daughters unconsciously relaxed, their spirits rising with the warm food, and the agreeable companionship which to each was and always had been exquisitely dear.

The dining-room in the daytime was the pleasantest room in the apartment. It and the kitchen overlooked a shabby back-yard, adjoining other shabby back-yards far below, in the midst of which, during summer, a giant locust tree was magnificently in leaf. There were floods of sunshine all afternoon from September to April, and a brief but pleasing view of the Hudson River could be seen between the wall of the house next door and an encroaching cornice of a building on Columbus Avenue. At night there was little in the room to recommend it. The wall-paper was a hideous yellow with acanthus leaves of a more hideous and darker yellow flourishing symmetrically upon it. There was a marble mantelpiece over a fireplace, and in the aperture for the grate a black lacquered iron grilling. Over the table hung a gaselier from the center of which four arms radiated at right angles, supporting globes of milky glass.

Mrs. Sturgis’ bedroom adjoined the dining-room and was separated from it by bumping folding-doors, only opened on occasions when Jeannette and Alice decided their mother’s room needed a thorough cleaning and airing. The latter seemed necessary much oftener than the former for the room had only one small window which, tucked into the corner, gave upon a narrow light-well. It was from this well, which extended clear down to the basement, that the evil smells arose when the Najarians, two flights below, began cooking one of their Armenian feasts.

In the center of the apartment were two dark little chambers occupied by the girls. Neither possessed a window, but the wall separating them was pierced by an opening, fitted with a hinged light of frosted glass which, when hooked back to the ceiling, permitted the necessary ventilation. These boxlike little rooms had to be used as a passageway. The only hall was the public one outside, at one end of which was a back door giving access to the kitchen and the dining-room, and, opposite this, a front one, opening into the large, commodious sitting-room, or studio—as it was dignified by the family—in which Mrs. Sturgis gave her music lessons.

It was this generous front room, with its high ceiling, its big bay window, its alcove ideally proportioned to hold the old grand piano, which had intrigued the little music-teacher twelve years before, when she had moved into the neighborhood after her husband’s death and begun her struggle for a home and livelihood. Whether or not the prospective pupils would be willing to climb the four long flights of stairs necessary to reach this thoroughly satisfactory environment for the dissemination of musical instruction was a question which only time would answer. Mrs. Sturgis had confidently expected that they would and her expectations had been realized. The dollar an hour, which was all she charged, had appealed to the more calculating of their parents; moreover Henrietta Spaulding Sturgis was a pianist of no mean distinction. She was a graduate of the Boston Conservatory, was in charge of the music at Miss Loughborough’s Concentration School for Little Girls on Central Park West, and was the accompanist for Tomaso Bellini, a well-known instructor in voice culture who had a studio in Carnegie Hall. These facts the neighborhood inevitably learned, and that lessons at such a price could be had from a teacher so well equipped was confided by one shrewd mother to another. The stairs were ignored; a little climbing, if taken slowly, never hurt any child!

But while year after year it became more and more advertised that bustling, round-faced, cheerful Mrs. Sturgis did have charge of the music at Miss Loughborough’s school on Tuesdays and Fridays of each week, and did play the accompaniments for the pupils of Signor Bellini at his Carnegie Hall studio on Mondays and Thursdays, no one suspected that sharp Miss Loughborough handed Mrs. Sturgis a check for only twenty-five dollars twice a month and that thrifty Signor Bellini paid but five dollars a day to his accompanist. Wednesdays and Saturdays were left for private lessons at a dollar an hour, and although Mrs. Sturgis could have filled other days of the week with pupils, Miss Loughborough and Signor Bellini represented an income that was certain, while nothing was more uncertain than the little pupils whose parents sent them regularly for a few months and then moved away or summarily discontinued the instruction often without explanation. Jeannette and Alice had urged their mother repeatedly to drop one or the other of her close-handed employers and take on more pupils, but to these entreaties Mrs. Sturgis had shaken her head with firm determination until her round little cheeks trembled.

“No—no, lovies; that may be all very well,—they may be underpaying me,—perhaps they are, but the money’s sure and that’s the comfort. It’s worth much more to me to know that than to earn twice the amount.”

It was the dreary hot summers that Mrs. Sturgis and her daughters dreaded when Miss Loughborough’s school closed its doors and Signor Bellini made his annual pilgrimage to Italy, and the little pupils who had filled the Wednesday and Saturday lesson hours drifted away to the beaches or the mountains. July and August were empty, barren months and against their profitlessness some provision had to be made; a little must be put by during the year to take care of this lean and trying period. But somehow, although Mrs. Sturgis firmly determined at the beginning of each season that never again would she subject her girls to the self-denials, even privations, they had endured during the summer, every year it became harder and harder to save, while each summer brought fresh humiliations and a slimmer purse. Even in the most prosperous seasons the small family was in debt, always a little behind, never wholly caught up, and as time went on, it became evident that each year found them further and further in arrears. They were always harassed by annoying petty accounts. Miss Loughborough’s and Signor Bellini’s money paid the rent and the actual daily food, and when a parent took it into his or her head to send a check for a child’s music, the amount had to be proportioned here and there: so much to the druggist, the dentist and doctor; so much to the steam laundry; so much to the ice company and dairy; so much for gas and fuel.

Emerging from the chrysalis of girlhood, Jeannette and Alice were rapidly becoming young women, with a healthy, normal appetite for pretty clothes and amusement. These were simple enough and might so easily have been gratified, Mrs. Sturgis often sadly thought, if her income would keep but a lagging pace with modestly expanding needs. It required a few extra dollars only each year, but where could she lay her hands on them? When a business expanded and its earnings grew proportionately, an employee’s salary was sure to be raised after a time of faithful service. Mrs. Sturgis did not dare increase the rates she charged for her lessons. She felt she was facing a blank wall; she could conceive of no way whereby she might earn more. Skimping what went on the table was an old recourse to which she and her children were now thoroughly accustomed. She did not see how she could possibly cut down further and still keep her girls properly nourished.

§ 5

She watched them affectionately now as they finished their dinner, observing her older daughter’s fastidious manipulation of her fork, the younger one’s birdlike way of twisting her small head as she ate. A fleeting wonder of what the future held in store for each passed through her mind. Jeannette was the more impetuous, and daring, was shrewd-minded, clear-thinking, efficient, was headstrong, and actuated ever by a suffering pride; she would undoubtedly grow into a tall, beautiful woman. Alice,—her mother’s “brown bird,”—seemed overshadowed by comparison and yet Mrs. Sturgis sometimes felt that Alice, with her simpler, unexacting, contented nature, her gentle faith, her meditative mind, was the more fortunate of the two. She, herself, turned to Jeannette for advice, for discussion of ways and means, and to Alice for sympathetic understanding and uncritical loyalty. They were both splendid girls, she mused fondly, who would make admirable wives. They must marry, of course; she had brought them up since they were tiny girls to consider a successful, happy marriage as their outstanding aim in life; she had trained them in the duties of wives, even of mothers, but she shuddered and her heart grew sick within her as she began dimly to perceive the time approaching when she must surrender their bloom and innocence and her complete proprietorship in them to some confident, ignorant young male who would unhesitatingly set up his half-baked judgment for his wife’s welfare against her hard-won knowledge of life. Yet both girls must marry; her heart was set on that. Marriage meant everything to a girl, and to the right husbands, her daughters would make ideal wives.

With the speed of long practice, the remains of the dinner were swept away and the kitchen set to rights. Both girls attempted to dissuade their mother from performing her customary dish-washing task, urging her that to-night she must rest. But Mrs. Sturgis would not listen; she was quite rested, she declared, and there was nothing to washing up the few dishes they had used; why, it wasn’t ten minutes’ work! She invariably insisted upon performing this dirtier, more vigorous task; Alice’s part was to wipe; Jeannette’s to clear the table, brush the cloth, put away the china and napkins, and replace the old square piece of chenille curtaining which had for years done duty as a table cover. Then there was the gas drop-light to set in its center, and connect with the gaselier above by a long tube ending in a curved brass nozzle that fitted over one of the burners. Where this joining occurred, there was always a slight escape of gas, and it frequently gave Mrs. Sturgis or her daughters a headache, but beyond an impatient comment from one of them, such as “Mercy me! the gas smells horribly to-night!” or “Open the window a little, dearie,—the gas is beginning to make my head ache,” nothing was ever done about it. It was one of those things in their lives to which they had grown accustomed and accepted along with the rest of the ills and goods of their days.

Mother and girls used the dining-room as the place to congregate, sew, read or idle. They rarely sat down or attempted to make themselves comfortable in the spacious front room. It was not nearly so agreeably intimate, and they felt it must always be kept in order for music lessons and for rare occasions when company came. “Company” usually turned out to be a pupil’s mother or a housemaid who came to explain that little Edna or Gracie had the mumps or was going to the dentist’s on Saturday and therefore would not be able to take her lesson, or a messenger from Signor Bellini to inquire if Mrs. Sturgis could play for one of his pupils the following evening. Such was the character of the callers, but the fiction of “company” was maintained.

The group Mrs. Sturgis and her daughters made about the dining-room table in the warm yellow radiance of the drop-light was intimately familiar and dear to each of them. There was always a certain amount of sewing going on,—mending or darning,—and hardly an evening passed without one or another industriously bending over her needle. Usually they were all three at it, for they made most of their own clothes. Each had her own particular side of the table and her own particular chair. They were extremely circumspect in the observance of one another’s preferences, and would apologize profusely if one happened to be found on the wrong side of the table or incorrectly seated. Mrs. Sturgis, on the rare occasions when she found herself with nothing particular to do, spread out a pack of cards before her and indulged in a meditative solitaire; Alice had always a novel in which she was absorbed. Generally three or four books were saved up in her room, and she considered herself dreadfully behind in her reading unless she had disposed of one of them as soon as she acquired another. Jeannette studied the fashions in the dress magazines and sometimes amused herself by drawing costume designs of her own.

But dressmaking occupied most of the evenings. There was usually a garment of some kind in process of manufacture, or a dress to be ripped to pieces and its materials used in new ways. Alice acted as model no matter for whom the work was intended. She had infinite patience and could stand indefinitely, sometimes with a bit of sewing in her hands, sometimes with a book propped before her on the mantel, indifferent and unconcerned, while her mother and sister crawled around her on the floor, pinning, pulling and draping the material about her young figure, or else sitting back on their heels and arguing with each other, while they eyed her with heads first on one side, then on the other.

§ 6

To-night Jeannette was making herself a corset cover, Alice was struggling over a school essay on “Home Life of the Greeks in the Age of Pericles,” and Mrs. Sturgis was darning. They had not been more than half-an-hour at their work, when there was the sound of masculine feet mounting the stairs, a hesitating step in the hall, and a brief ring of the doorbell. They glanced at one another questioningly and Alice rose. Alice always answered the bell.

“If it’s old Bellini wanting you to-night....” Jeannette began in annoyance. But the man’s voice that reached them was no messenger’s; it was polite and friendly, and it was for Alice’s sister he inquired. Jeannette found Dikron Najarian in the front room. The young man was all bashful breathlessness.

“There’s an Armenian society here in New York, Miss Sturgis. My father was one of its organizers, has been a member for years. We’re having a dance to-night at Weidermann’s Hall on Amsterdam Avenue, and my cousin, Louisa, who was going with me, is ill; she has a bad toothache. I have her ticket and ... will you come in her place? Rosa’s going, of course, and ... tell your mother I’ll bring you home at twelve o’clock.”

It was said in an anxious rush, with hopeful eagerness. Jeannette, bewildered, went to consult her mother. Mrs. Sturgis hastily pinned one of her jabots around her neck and appeared to confront young Najarian in the studio. She listened to the invitation thoughtfully, her head cocked upon one side, her lips pursed in judicial fashion. Janny was still very young, she explained; she had never attended anything quite—quite so grown-up, she was used only to the parties her school friends sometimes asked her to, and Mrs. Sturgis was afraid....

Suddenly Jeannette wanted to go. She pinched her mother’s arm, and an impatient protest escaped her lips.

“Oh, please, Mrs. Sturgis....” pleaded the young man.

A rich contralto voice sounded from the hallway of the floor below. The door to the apartment had been left open and now they could see big handsome Rosa Najarian’s face through the banisters as she stood halfway up the stairs.

“Do let your daughter come, Mrs. Sturgis. They are all nice boys and girls. I will keep a sharp eye on her and bring her home to you safely.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Sturgis, “I just wanted to feel satisfied that everything was right and proper.”

There were some further words. Jeannette left her mother talking with Dikron and flew to the dining-room, to her sister.

“Quick, Alice dearie! Dikron Najarian’s asked me to a dance. I must fly! Help me get ready. He’s waiting.”

Instantly there was a scurry, a jerking open of bureau drawers, a general diving into crowded closets. The question immediately arose, what was Jeannette to wear? In a mad burst of extravagance, she had sent her dotted Swiss muslin to the laundry. There remained only her old “party” dress, which had been done over and over, lengthened and lengthened, until now the velvet was worn and shiny, the covering of some of the buttons was gone and showed the bright metal beneath, the ribbon about the waist was split in several places. Yet there was nothing else, and while the girl was hooking herself into it, Alice daubed the metal buttons with ink, and sewed folds of the ribbon over where it had begun to split. Jeannette borrowed stockings from her sister and wedged her feet into a pair of her mother’s pumps which were too small for her. Her black lusterless locks were happily becomingly arranged, and excitement brought a warm dull red to her olive-tinted cheeks. She was in gay spirits when Najarian called for her some fifteen minutes later, and went off with him chattering vivaciously.

Mrs. Sturgis stood for a moment in the open doorway of her apartment and listened to the descending feet upon the stairs, to the lessening sound of gay young voices. She assured herself she caught Rosa Najarian’s warmer accents as the older girl met her brother and Jeannette two flights below; she still bent her ear for the last sounds of the little party as it made its way down the final flight of stairs, paused for an interval in the lowest hallway, and banged the front door behind it with a dull reverberation and a shiver of glass. As the house grew still she waited a minute or two longer with compressed lips and a troubled frown, then shook her round little cheeks firmly, turned back into her own apartment, and without comment began to help Alice hang up Jeannette’s discarded clothing and set the disordered room to rights.

§ 7

Jeannette found her mother sitting up for her when she returned a little after twelve. Mrs. Sturgis was engaged in writing out bills for her lessons which she would mail on the last day of the month. The old canvas-covered ledger with its criss-crossed pages, its erasures and torn edges in which she kept her accounts was a familiar sight in her hands. She was forever turning its thumbed and ink-stained leaves, studying old and new entries, making half-finished calculations in the margins or blank spaces. She sat now in the unbecoming flannelette gown she wore at night, her thin hair in two skimpy pig-tails on either side of her neck, a tattered knitted shawl of a murderous red about her shoulders, and a comforter across her knees. In the yellow light of the hissing gas above her head, she appeared haggard and old, with dark pockets underneath her scant eyebrows and even gaunt hollows in the little cheeks that bulged plumply and bravely during the day above her tight lace collars.

“Well,—dear-ie!” Bright animation struggled into the mother’s face, and her voice at once was all eagerness and interest. “Did you have a good time? ... Tell me about it.”

Immediately she detected something was amiss. There was none of the gay exhilaration and youthful exuberance in her daughter’s manner, she had confidently expected. One searching glance into the glittering dark eyes, as the girl stooped to kiss her, told her Jeannette was fighting tears, struggling to control a burst of pent-up feeling.

“Why, dearie! What’s the matter? ... Tell me.”

“Oh——!” There was young fury in the exclamation. Jeannette flung herself into a chair and buried her face in her hands, plunging her finger-tips deep into her thick coils of black hair. For several minutes she would not answer her mother’s anxious inquiries.

“Wasn’t Mr. Najarian nice to you? Didn’t he look after you? Didn’t you have a good time? Tell Mama,” Mrs. Sturgis persisted.

“Oh, yes,—he was very nice, ... yes, he took good care of me,—and Rosa did, too.”

“Then what is it, dearie? What happened? Mama wants to know.”

Jeannette drew a long breath and got brusquely to her feet.

“Oh, it’s this!” she burst out, striking the gown she wore with contemptuous fingers. “It’s these miserable things I have to wear! There wasn’t a girl there, to-night,—not even one,—that wasn’t better dressed. I was a laughing-stock among them! ... Oh, I know I was, I know I was! ... They all felt sorry for me: a poor little neighbor of Dikron Najarian’s on whom he had taken pity and whom he had asked to a dance! ... Oh! I can’t and won’t stand it, Mama.”

Tears suddenly choked her but she fought them down and stilled her mother’s rush of expostulations.

“No—no, Mama! ... It’s nobody’s fault. You work your fingers to the bone for Allie and me; you work from daylight till dark to keep us in school and in idleness. I’m not going to let you do it any longer.... No, Mama, I’m not going to let things go on as they are. I needed some experience like to-night’s to make me wake up.”

“What experience? Don’t talk so wild, baby.”

“Finding out for myself I was the shabbiest dressed girl in the room! There were a lot of other girls there,—really nice girls. I didn’t expect it. I suppose I thought I wouldn’t find any American girls like myself at an Armenian dance. I don’t know what I thought! ... But there were only a few like Rosa and Dikron, and all the other girls were beautifully dressed.”

Jeannette broke off and began to blink hard for self-control. Her mother, her face twisted with sympathy and distress, could only pat her hand and murmur soothingly over and over: “Dearie—my poor dearie—my dearie-girl——”

“I saw one old lady sizing me up,” Jeannette went on presently. “I could see right into her brain and I knew every thought she was thinking. She looked me over from my feet to my hair and from my hair to my feet. There wasn’t a thing wrong or right with me that that old cat missed! She didn’t mean it unkindly; she was merely interested in noting how shabby I was.... And Mama,—it was a revelation to me! I could just see ahead into the years that are coming, and I could see that that was to be my fate always wherever I went: to be shabbily dressed and be pitied.”

“Now—now, dearie,—don’t take on so. Mama will work hard; we’ll save——”

“But that’s just what I won’t have!” Jeannette interrupted passionately. “I’m not going to let you go on slaving for Allie and me, making yourself a drudge.... What’s it all for? Just so Allie and I can marry suitable rich young men! Isn’t that it? Ever since I can remember, I’ve heard you talk about our future husbands and what kind of men they are to be. You’ve been describing to us for years the time when we’ll be going to dances and theatres. Going, yes, but how? Dressed like this? Worn, shabby old clothes? To be pitied by other women? ... No, Mama, I won’t do it. I’d rather stay home with you for the rest of my life and grow up to be an old maid!”

“Oh, Janny, don’t talk so reckless. You take things so seriously, and you’re always imagining the worst side of everything. There are thousands of girls a great deal worse off than you. There are thousands of mothers and fathers and daughters in this city right this minute who are facing just this problem. It’s as old as the hills. But there’s always a way out,—a way that’s right and proper. Don’t let it trouble you, dearie; leave it to Mama; Mama’ll manage.”

“No, Mama, I won’t leave it to you! I’ve got eyes in my head and I see how hard you have to struggle. We’re always behind as it is,—pestered by bills and the tradespeople. Why, this very afternoon we didn’t have a cent in the house,—not even a copper,—and you had to borrow a dime from Mildred Carpenter to buy bread! Just think of it! We didn’t have money enough for bread!”

“But, dearie, I’ve got Miss Loughborough’s check in my purse.”

“Yes, and we owe ten times its amount! ... We’re running steadily behind. I don’t see anything better ahead. It’s going to be this way year after year, always falling a little more and a little more behind, until—until, well—until people won’t trust us any more.”

“Perhaps we could cut down a bit somewheres, Janny.”

“Oh, Mama, don’t talk nonsense! I’m going to work,—that’s all there is about it.”

“Jeannette! ... You can’t! ... You mustn’t!”

“Well, I am just the same. Rosa Najarian is a stenographer with the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and she gets eighteen dollars a week! ... Think of it, Mama! Eighteen dollars a week! She took a ten weeks’ course at the Gerard Commercial School and at the end of that time they got her a job. She didn’t have to wait a week! ... No, I’m not going to High School another day. To-morrow I’m going down to that Commercial School.”

“But, dearie—dearie! You don’t want to be a working girl!”

“You’re a working woman, aren’t you?”

“But, my dear, I had no other choice. I had my girls to bring up, and I’ve grubbed and slaved, as you say, just so my daughters would never have to take positions. I’ve worked hard to make ladies of you, dearie,—and no lady’s a shop-girl.... Oh, I couldn’t bear it! You and Allie shop-girls! ... Janny,—it would finish me.”

“Well, Mama, you don’t feel so awfully about Rosa Najarian—do you? You consider Rosa a lady, don’t you?”

“She’s an Armenian, Jeannette, and I know nothing about Armenians. Besides she is not my daughter. The kind of men I want for husbands to my girls will not be looking for their wives behind shop counters!”

“But, Mama, stenographers don’t work behind counters.”

“Oh, yes, they do.... Anyway it’s the same thing.”

Jeannette felt suddenly too tired to continue the discussion. Her mind began turning over the changes the step she contemplated would occasion. Mrs. Sturgis’ fingers played a nervous tattoo upon her tremulous lips. She glanced apprehensively at her daughter and in that moment realized the girl would have her way.

“Oh, dearie, dearie!” she burst out. “I can’t have you go to work!”

Jeannette knew that no opposition from her mother would alter her purpose. Where her mind was made up, her mother invariably capitulated. It had been so for a long time, and Jeannette, at least, was aware of it. As she foresaw the full measure of her mother’s distress when she put her decision into effect, she came and knelt beside her chair, gathered the tired figure in its absurd flannelette nightgown in her arms and kissed the thin silky hair where it parted and showed the papery white skin of her scalp. Mrs. Sturgis bent her head against her daughter’s shoulder, while the tears trickled down her nose and fell upon the girl’s bare arm. Jeannette murmured consolingly but her mother refused to be comforted, indicating her disapproval by firm little shakes of her head which she managed now and then between watery sniffles.

There were finally many kisses between them and many loving assurances. The girl promised to do nothing without careful consideration, and they would all three discuss the proposition from every angle in the morning. When they had said a last good-night and the girl had gone to her room, Mrs. Sturgis still sat on under the hissing gas jet with the red, torn shawl about her shoulders, the comforter across her knees. The tears dried on her face, and for a long time she stared fixedly before her, her lips moving unconsciously with her thoughts.

The little suite of rooms she had known so intimately for twelve long years grew still; the chill of the dead of night crept in; Jeannette’s light went out. Mrs. Sturgis reached for the canvas-covered ledger on the table beside her and began a rapid calculation of figures on its last page. For a long time she stared at the result, then rose deliberately, and went into her room. There she cautiously pulled an old trunk from the wall, unlocked its lid, raised a dilapidated tray, and knelt down. In the bottom was an old papier-maché box, battered and scratched, with rubbed corners. She opened this and began carefully to examine its contents. There was the old brooch pin Ralph had given her after the first concert they attended together, and there were her mother’s coral earrings and necklace, and the little silver buckles Jeannette had worn on her first baby shoes. There were some other trinkets: a stud, Ralph’s collapsible gold pencil, a French five-franc piece, a scarf-pin from whose setting the stone was missing. Tucked into a faded leather photograph case was a sheaf of folded pawn tickets. That was the way her rings had gone, and the diamond pin, Ralph’s jeweled cuff-links and the gold head of her father’s ebony cane. She picked up the pair of silver buckles and examined them in the palm of her hand; presently she added the gold brooch and the collapsible pencil before she put back the contents of the trunk and locked it. For some moments she stood in the center of her room gently jingling these ornaments together. Then her eye travelled to her bureau; slowly she approached it, and one after another lifted the gold chains she wore during the day. These she disengaged from her eye-glasses and watch, and wrapped them with the buckles and the brooch in a bit of tissue paper pulled from a lower drawer. But still she did not seem satisfied. With the tissue-paper package in her hand, she sat on the edge of her bed, frowning thoughtfully, her fingers slowly tapping her lips. Presently a light came into her eyes. She lit a candle and stole softly through the girls’ rooms, into the great gaunt chamber that was the studio. In one corner was a bookcase, overflowing with old novels, magazines, and battered school-books. It was a higgledy-piggledy collection of years, a library without value save for five substantial volumes of Grove’s Musical Dictionary on a lower shelf. Mrs. Sturgis knelt before these, drew them out one by one, and laid them beside her on the floor. She opened the first volume and read the inscription: “To my ever patient, gentle Henrietta, for five trying years my devoted wife, true friend, and loving companion, from her grateful and affectionate husband, Ralph.” There was the date,—twelve years ago,—and he had died within six months after he had written those words. Her fingers moved to her trembling lips and she frowned darkly.

She closed the book, carried the five volumes to a shelf in a closet near at hand, and tucked them out of sight in a far corner. There was one last business to be performed: the books in the bookcase must be rearranged to fill the vacant place where the dictionary had stood. Mrs. Sturgis was not satisfied until her efforts seemed convincing. At last she picked up her wavering candle and made her way back to her own room. As she got into bed the old onyx clock on the mantel in the dining-room struck three blurred notes upon its tiny harsh gong. Only when darkness had shut down and the night was silent, did tears come to the tired eyes. There was then a blinding rush, and a few quick, strangling sobs. Mrs. Sturgis stifled these and wiped her eyes hardily upon a fold of the rough sheet. She steadied a trembling lip with a firm hand and resolutely turned upon her side to compose herself for sleep.

CHAPTER II

§ 1

It took all Jeannette’s young vigorous determination to carry into effect the plan she had conceived the night of the Armenian dance. She met with an unexpected degree of opposition from her mother, and even from Alice, who was as a rule indecisive, and the vaguest of persons in expressing opinions. It was too grave a step; Janny might come to regret it bitterly some day, and it might be too late then to go back; Alice thought perhaps it would be wiser to wait awhile. But Jeannette did not want to wait. The more she thought about being a wage-earner, and her own mistress, free to do as she pleased and spend her money as she chose, the more eager she was to be done with school and the supervision of teachers. She felt suddenly grown up, and looked enviously at the young women she met hurrying to the elevated station at Ninety-third Street in the early mornings on their way downtown to business. She noted how they dressed and critically observed those who carried their lunches. She thought about what she should wear, the kind of hat and shoes she would select, when she was one of them. If it meant skipping her noonday meal entirely, she decided, she would never be guilty of carrying lunch with her. Alice and her intimates at school on a sudden became drearily young to her; she was irritated by their giggling silliness. She chose to treat them all with a certain aloofness, and began to regard herself already as a highly-paid, valued secretary of the president of a large corporation. In the evenings she found excuses for visiting Rosa Najarian and eagerly listened to the older girl’s account of the business routine of her days.

The tuition at the Gerard Commercial School for ten weeks’ instruction in shorthand and typing was fifty dollars payable in advance, and it was her inability to get this sum that prevented Jeannette from putting her plan immediately into effect. She made herself unhappy and her mother and sister unhappy by worrying about it. Mrs. Sturgis fretted uncomfortably. She alone was aware of an easy way by which the money could be obtained, but since she did not approve of her daughter’s purpose, she had no inclination to divulge it.

A five thousand dollar paid-up insurance policy from a benevolent society had become hers at the time of her husband’s death. It represented a nest-egg, the thought of which had always been the greatest comfort to her. In sickness or in case of her death, the girls would have something; they would not be left absolutely destitute. She had never mentioned this policy to her daughters, always being afraid she might borrow on it, and many a time she had been sorely tempted to do so. With the knowledge of its existence unshared with anyone, Mrs. Sturgis felt herself equal to temptation; but once taking her children into her confidence, she feared she would soon weakly make inroads upon it.

Now as Jeannette became restive and impatient for want of fifty dollars, her mother grew correspondingly depressed. It was to protect herself against just such wild-goose schemes as this, she told herself over and over, that she had refrained from telling her darlings anything about the money.

But events, unforeseen, and from her point of view, calamitous, robbed her of her fortitude, and forced her to play into her daughter’s hands. Scarlet fever broke out in the neighborhood; an epidemic swept the upper West Side; the Wednesday and Saturday lessons,—all of them,—had to be discontinued; Miss Loughborough’s school closed its doors. Mrs. Sturgis found some music to copy, but the money she earned in this way was far short of the meager income upon which she and her daughters had depended. The days stretched into weeks and still new cases were reported in the district. The time came when there was actual want in the little household, literally no money with which to buy food, and no further credit to be had among the tradespeople.

Jeannette applied for and secured the promise of a job in a small upholsterer’s shop in the neighborhood at six dollars a week, and in the face of her firm resolution to accept the offer and go to work on the following Monday morning, Mrs. Sturgis confessed her secret. As she had foreseen, Jeannette had little difficulty in persuading her,—since now she would be compelled to borrow on her store,—to make the amount of her loan fifty dollars additional.

“Why, Mama, I’ll be earning that much a month in ten weeks, and I can pay it back to you in no time.”

“I know—I know, dearie. But I just hate to do it.”

Eventually, she gave way before her daughter’s flood of arguments. It was what she had feared ever since Ralph died; there would be no stopping now the inroads upon her little capital; she saw the beginning of the end.

But Jeannette went triumphantly to school.

§ 2

After the first few days while she felt herself conspicuous as a new pupil, she began to enjoy herself immensely. The studies fascinated her. Hers was an alert mind and she was unusually intelligent. She had always been regarded as an exceptionally bright student, but she had achieved this reputation with little application. Her school work heretofore had represented merely “lessons” to her; it had never carried any significance. But now she threw herself with all the intensity of her nature upon what seemed to her a vital business. She realized she had only ten weeks in which to master shorthand and typing, and at the end of that time would come the test of her ability to fill a position as stenographer. She dared not risk the humiliation of failure; her pride,—the strongest element in her make-up,—would not permit it. She must work, work, work; she must utilize every hour, every minute of these precious weeks of instruction!

The girl knew in her heart that she had many of the qualifications of a good secretary. She was pretty, she was well-mannered, intelligent, and could speak and write good English. To find ample justification for this estimate, she had but to compare herself with other girls in the school. These for the most part were foreign-born. A large percentage were Jewesses, thick-lipped and large-nosed, with heavy black coils of hair worn over ill-disguised “rats.” Jeannette detected a finer type, but even to these exceptions she felt herself superior. They chewed gum a great deal, and shrieked over their confidences as they ate their lunches out of cardboard boxes at the noon hour. She could not bring herself to associate with such girls, and forestalled any approach to friendliness on their part by choosing a remote corner to devote the leisure minutes to study. In consequence she became the butt of much of their silly laughter, and though she winced at these whisperings and jibes, she never betrayed annoyance. There was a sprinkling of men and boys throughout the school, but the male element was made up of middle-aged dullards and pimply-necked raw youths, none of whom interested her.

The weeks fled by, and Jeannette was carried along on an undiminished wave of excitement. Everything she coveted most in the world depended upon her winning a diploma from the school at the end of the ten weeks’ instruction. She discovered soon after her enrollment, that while this might be physically possible, it was rarely accomplished, and most of her fellow students had been attending the school for months. A diploma represented to her the measure of success, and as the time grew shorter before she was to take the final examinations, she could hardly sleep from the intensity of her emotions.

At home, matters had materially improved. The epidemic was over; Miss Loughborough’s school had reopened its doors, and Mrs. Sturgis was again beginning to fill her Wednesdays and Saturdays with lessons. But the problem of finances was still unsolved. There was a loan of five hundred dollars now on the insurance policy, and Jeannette foresaw her mother would not cease to fret and worry over that until it had somehow been paid back. Everything, it seemed to her, depended on her success at school. There was no hope for the little family otherwise. Alice—trusting, complacent little Alice—was not the type who could shoulder any of the burden; her mother was perceptibly not as strong as she had been. There would always be debts, there would always be worry, there would always be skimping and self-denial, unless she, Jeannette, got a job and went to work.

Weary with fatigue, she would drive herself at her practice on the rented typewriter in the studio every evening until her back flamed with fire and her fingertips grew sore. She made Alice read aloud to her while she filled page after page in her note-book with her hooks and dashes, until her sister drooped with sleep. Mrs. Sturgis protested, actually cried a little. The child was killing herself to no purpose! There wasn’t any sense in working so hard! She was wasting her time and it would end by their having a doctor!

Jeannette shook her head and held her peace, but when the reward came and old Roger Mason, who had been principal of the school for nearly twenty years, sent for her and told her he wanted to congratulate her on the excellent showing she had made, she felt amply compensated. But none of those who eagerly congratulated her,—not even her mother nor Alice,—suspected how infinitely harder than mastering her lessons had been what she had endured from the jeering, mimicking girls who had made fun of her through the dreadful ten weeks.

But that was all behind her now. She could forget it. She had justified herself, and stood ready to prove to her mother and sister that she could now fill a position as a regular stenographer, could hold it, and moreover bring them material help. She was all eagerness to begin,—frightened at the prospect, yet confident of success.

§ 3

Graduates of the Gerard Commercial School ordinarily did not have to wait long for a job. The demand for stenographers was usually in excess of the supply. Little Miss Ingram, down at the school, who had in hand the matter of finding positions for Gerard graduates, was interested in obtaining the best that was available for Miss Sturgis who had made such an excellent record, and Jeannette was thrilled one morning at receiving a note asking her to report at the school without delay if she wished employment.

Miss Ingram handed her an address on Fourth Avenue.

“It’s a publishing house. They publish subscription books, I think,—something of that sort. I don’t urge you to take it,—something better may come along,—but you can look them over and see how you think you’d like it. They’ll pay fifteen.”

“Fifteen a week?” Jeanette raised delighted eyes. “Oh, Miss Ingram, do you think I can please them? Do you think they’ll give me a chance?”

Miss Ingram smiled and squeezed Jeannette’s arm reassuringly.

“Of course, my dear, and they’ll be delighted with you. You’re a great deal better equipped than most of our girls.”

The Soulé Publishing Company occupied a spacious floor of a tall building on Fourth Avenue. Jeannette was deafened by the clatter of typewriters as she stepped out of the elevator.

The loft was filled with long lines of girls seated at typewriting machines and at great broad-topped tables piled high with folded circulars. Figures, silhouetted against the distant windows, moved to and fro between the aisles. It was a turmoil of noise and confusion.

As she stood before the low wooden railing that separated her from it all, trying to adjust her eyes to the kaleidoscopic effect of movement and light, a pert young voice addressed her:

“Who did chou want t’ see, ple-ease?”

A little Jewess of some fourteen or fifteen years with an elaborate coiffure surmounting her peaked pale face was eyeing her inquiringly.

“I called to see about—about a position as stenographer.”

Jeannette’s voice all but failed her; the words fogged in her throat.

“Typist or regular steno?”

“Stenographer, I think; shorthand and transcription,—wasn’t that what was wanted?”

“See Miss Gibson; first desk over there, end of third aisle.” The little girl swung back a gate in the railing, screwed up the corners of her mouth, tucked a stray hair into place at the nape of her neck, and with an assumed expression of elaborate boredom waited for Jeannette to pass through.

It took courage to invade that region of bustle and clamor. Jeannette advanced with faltering step, felt the waters close over her head, and herself engulfed in the whirling tide. Once of it, it did not seem so terrifying. Already her ears were becoming attuned to the rat-ti-tat-tating that hummed in a roar about her, and her eyes accustomed to the flying fingers, the flashing paper, the bobbing heads, and hurrying figures.

Miss Gibson was a placid, gray-haired woman, large-busted and severely dressed in an immaculate shirtwaist that was tucked trimly into a snug belt about her firm, round person.

She smiled perfunctorily at the girl as she indicated the chair beside her desk. Jeannette felt her eyes swiftly taking inventory of her. Her interrogations were of the briefest. She made a note of Jeannette’s age, name and address, and schooling. She then launched into a description of the work.

The Soulé Publishing Company sold a great many books by subscription: Secret Memoirs, The Favorites of Great Kings, A Compendium of Mortal Knowledge. Their most recent publication was a twenty-five volume work entitled A Universal History of the World. This set of books was supposed to contain a complete historical record of events from the beginning of time, and was composed of excerpts from the writings of great historians, all deftly welded together to make a comprehensive narrative. A tremendous advertising campaign was in progress; all magazines carried full-page advertisements, and a coupon clipped from a corner of them brought a sample volume by mail for inspection. When these volumes were returned, they were accompanied by an order or a letter giving the reason why none was enclosed. To the latter, a personal reply was immediately written by Mr. Beardsley,—Miss Gibson indicated a young man seated by a window some few desks away. He dictated to a corps of stenographers, and followed up his first letters with others, each containing an argument in favor of the books.

Miss Gibson enunciated this information with a glibness that suggested many previous recitations. When she had finished, with disconcerting abruptness, she asked Jeannette if she thought she could do the work. The girl, taken aback, could only stare blankly; she had no idea whether she could do it or not; she shook her head aimlessly. Miss Gibson frowned.

“Well,—we’ll see what you can do,” she declared. “Miss Rosen,” she called, and as a young Jewess came toward them, she directed: “Take Miss—Miss”—she glanced at her notes,—“Sturgis to the cloak room, and bring her back here.”

Jeannette’s mind was a confused jumble. “They won’t kill me,—they won’t eat me,” she found herself thinking.

Presently she stood before Miss Gibson once more. The woman glanced at her, and rose.

“Come this way.” They walked toward the young man she had previously indicated.

“Mr. Beardsley, try this girl out. She comes from the Gerard School, but she’s had no practical experience.”

Jeannette looked into a pleasant boy’s face. He had an even row of glittering white teeth, a small, quaint mouth that stretched tightly across them when he smiled, blue eyes, and rather unruly stuck-up hair.

She wanted to please him—she could please him—he seemed nice.

“Miss—Miss—I beg pardon,—Miss Gibson did not mention the name.”

“Sturgis.”

“There’s a vacant table over there. You can have a Remington or an Underwood—anything you are accustomed to; we have all styles.... Miss Flannigan, take charge of Miss Sturgis, will you?”

A big-boned Irish girl came toward him. She was a slovenly type but apparently disposed to be friendly.

“I’ll lend you a note-book and pencils till you can draw your own from the stock clerk. You have to make out a requisition for everything you want, here. You’ll find paper in that drawer, and that’s a Remington if you use one.”

Jeannette slipped into the straight-back chair and settled with a sense of relief before the flimsy little table on which the typewriter stood. She was eager for a moment’s inconspicuousness.

“This is the kind of stuff he gives you.”

Miss Flannigan leaned over from behind and offered her several yellow sheets of typewriting.

Jeannette took them with a murmured thanks, and began to read.

“... deferred payment plan. Five dollars will immediately secure this handsome twenty-five volume set.... On the first of May, the price of these books, as advertised, must advance, but by subscribing now....”

She wet her dry lips and glanced at another page.

“The authenticity of these sources of historical information cannot be doubted.... Eliminating the traditions which can hardly be accepted as dependable chronicles, we turn to the Egyptian records which are still extant in graven symbols.”

She couldn’t do it! It was harder than anything she had ever had in practice! She saw failure confronting her. The sting of tears pricked her eyes, and she pressed her lips tightly together.

Blindly she picked up a stiff bristle brush and began to clean the type of her machine. She slipped in a sheet of paper, and, to distract herself, rattled off briskly some of her school exercises. Those other girls could do it! She saw them glancing at their notes, and busily clicking at their machines. They did not seem to be having difficulty. Miss Flannigan,—that raw-boned Irish girl with no breeding, no education, no brains!—how was it that she managed it?

She frowned savagely and her fingers flew.

“Miss Sturgis.”

Young Mr. Beardsley was smiling at her invitingly. She rose, gathering up her pencils and note-book.

“Sit down, Miss Sturgis. This work may seem a little difficult to you at first but you’ll soon get on to it. Most of these letters are very much alike. There’s no particular accuracy required. The idea is to get in closer touch with these people who have written in or inquired about the books, and we write them personal letters for the effect the direct message....”

He went on explaining, amiably, reassuringly. Jeannette thawed under his pleasant manner; confidence came surging back. She made up her mind she liked this young man; he was considerate, he was kind, he was a gentleman.

“The idea, of course, is always to have your letters intelligible. If you don’t understand what you have written, the person to whom it is addressed, won’t either. I don’t care whether you get my actual words or not. You’re always at liberty to phrase a sentence any way you choose as long as it makes sense.... Now let’s see; we’ll try one. Frank Curry, R.F.D. 1, Topeka, Kansas.... I’ll go slow at first, but if I forget and get going too rapidly, don’t hesitate to stop me.”

Jeannette, with her note-book balanced on her knee, bent to her work. Beardsley spoke slowly and distinctly. After the first moments of agonizing despair, she began to catch her breath and concentrate on the formation of her notes. More than once she was tempted to write a word out long-hand; she hesitated over “historical,” “consummation,” “inaccurate.” She had been told at school never to permit herself to do this. Better to fail at first, they had said, than to grow to depend on slipshod ways.

The ordeal lasted half-an-hour.

“Suppose you try that much, Miss Sturgis, and see how you get along.”

She rose and gathered up the bundle of letters. Beardsley gave her a friendly, encouraging smile as she turned away.

“How pleasant and kind everyone is!” Jeannette thought as she made her way back to her little table.

But her heart died within her as she began to decipher her notes. Again and again they seemed utterly meaningless,—a whole page of them when the curlicues, hooks and dashes looked to her like so many aimless pencil marks. She frowned and bent over her book despairingly, squeezing hard the fingers of her clasped hands together. What had he said! How had he begun that paragraph? ... Oh, she hadn’t had enough training yet, not enough experience! She couldn’t do it! She’d have to go to him and tell him she couldn’t do the work! And he had been so kind to her! And she would have to tell capable, friendly Miss Gibson that a month or two more in school perhaps would be wiser before she could attempt to do the work of a regular stenographer! And there were her mother and sister, too! She would have to confess to them as well that she had failed! The thought strangled her. Tears brimmed her eyes.

“Perhaps you’re in trouble? Can I help?” A gentle voice from across the narrow aisle addressed her. Jeannette through blurred vision saw a round, white face with kindly sympathetic eyes looking at her.

“What system do you use? The Munson? ... That’s good. Let me see your notes. Just read as far as you can; his letters are so much alike, I think I can help you.”

Jeannette winked away the wetness in her eyes, and read what she was able.

“Oh, yes, I know,” interrupted this new friend; “it goes this way.” She flashed a paper into her machine and clicked out with twinkling fingers a dozen lines.

“See if that isn’t it,” said the girl handing her the paper.

Jeannette read the typewritten lines and referred to her notes.

“Yes, it’s just the same.” Her eyes shone. “I’m so much obliged.”

“It seemed to me awfully hard at first. I thought I never could do it.”

“Did you?” Jeannette smiled gratefully.

“Oh, yes; we all had an awful time. He uses such outlandish words.”

§ 4

The morning was gone before she knew it. She went out at lunch-time, walked a few blocks up Fourth Avenue and then turned back to the office. She did not eat; she did not want any lunch; her mind was absorbed in her work; she had hardly left the building before she wanted to get back to her desk, to recopy a letter or two in which she had made some erasures. The afternoon fled like the morning.

A whirl of confused impressions spun about in her brain as she shut her eyes and tried to go to sleep that night. Although she ached with fatigue, she was too excited to lose consciousness at once. The day’s events, like a merry-go-round, wheeled around and around her. On the whole she was satisfied. She had finished all of the letters Mr. Beardsley had given her; he had beckoned her to come to him after he had read them, had commended her, and given her back but one to correct in which the punctuation was faulty.

“I’m sure you’ll do all right, Miss Sturgis,” he told her. “You’ll find it much easier as soon as you get used to the work.”

And Jeannette felt she had made a real friend in Miss Alexander, the girl across the aisle who had so generously, so wonderfully helped her. Among the riff-raff of girls that surged in and out of the office, cheaply dressed, loud-laughing, common little chits, Beatrice Alexander was easily recognizable as belonging to Jeannette’s own class. Each had discerned in the other a similarity of thought, of taste and refinement that drew them immediately together.

A wonderful, tremendous feeling of importance and self-respect came to Jeannette as she had made her way across crowded Twenty-third Street and encountered a great tide of other workers homeward bound; as she climbed the steep elevated station steps, and with the pushing, jostling crowd wedged her way on board a train; as she hung to a strap in the swaying car and squeezed herself through the jam of people about the doorway when Ninety-third Street was reached, and as she walked the brief block and a half that remained before she was at last at home. Every instant of the way she hugged the soul-satisfying thought that she had proven herself; now she was truly a full-fledged wage-earner, a working girl. She had achieved, she felt, economic value.

§ 5

Life began to take on a new flavor. The future held hidden golden promises. Jeannette had always had a protecting, proprietary attitude toward her mother and Alice, but now she was acutely aware of it, and the thought was sweet to her; she revelled in the prospect of the rôle she must inevitably assume. All her world was centered in her eager, hard-working, ever-cheerful, fussy little mother, and her gentle brown-eyed sister who looked up to her with such adoration and implicit faith. Jeannette felt she had forever established their confidence in her by this successful step into the business world. Her mother had been completely won by her good fortune, and her stout little bosom swelled with pride in her daughter’s achievement. Eagerly she told her pupils about it, and even regaled with the news fat good-natured Signor Bellini and politely indifferent Miss Loughborough.

To Jeannette, the Soulé Publishing Company became at once a concern of tremendous importance. Before little Miss Ingram had mentioned its name to her, she was not sure she had ever heard it. Now she seemed to see it wherever she turned, heard about it in chance conversations at least once a day; it leaped at her from advertisements in the newspapers and from the pages of magazines. Books, she casually picked up, bore its imprint. A great pride in the big company that employed her came to her: it was the largest and most enterprising of all publishing houses; it was spending a million dollars advertising The Universal History of the World; it had hundreds of employees on its pay-roll!

If there were less roseate aspects of the concern that paid her fifteen dollars every Saturday, Jeannette did not see them. She never stopped to examine critically the history she was helping to sell, nor to glance into the pages of the Secret Memoirs, nor to open the leaves of the set of books labelled Favorites of Great Kings. She never thought it curious that the firm employed so many cheaply dressed, vulgar-tongued little Jewesses, and sallow-skinned, covert-eyed girls. Nor did she wonder that she never observed any important-looking individuals who might be officials of the company, walking about or up and down the aisles of the racketting, bustling loft. There was only Mr. Kent. The others, whoever they might be, confined their activities, she came to understand, to the main offices of the Company on West Thirty-second Street. This great loft with its sea of life was only a temporary arrangement,—part of the great selling campaign by which a hundred thousand sets of the History were to be sold before May first. Something of tremendous import was to happen on this fateful date,—an upheaval in trade conditions, a great change in the publishing world. Jeannette was not sure what it was all to be about, but she was convinced that after May first, the public would no longer have this wonderful chance to buy the twenty-five volumes of the History at such a ridiculously low price.

Behind glass partitions in one corner of the extensive floor were the inner offices,—the “holy of holies” Jeannette thought of them,—where Mr. Edmund Kent existed, pulled wires, touched bells, and gave orders that generalled the activities of the hundreds of human beings who clicked away at their typewriters, or deftly folded thousands and thousands of circulars, to tuck into waiting envelopes that were later dragged away in grimy, striped-canvas mail sacks. Mr. Edmund Kent was the Napoleon, the great King, the Far-seeing Master who in his awesome, mysterious glass-partitioned office, ruled them with arbitrary and benevolent power. All day long, Jeannette heard Mr. Kent’s name mentioned. Miss Gibson quoted him; Mr. Beardsley decided this or that important matter must be referred to him. What Mr. Kent thought, said, did, was final. The girl used to catch a glimpse of the great man, now and then, as he came in, in the morning, or went out to a late lunch: a square-shouldered, firm-stepping man with a derby hat, a straight, trim mustache, and an overcoat whose corners flapped about his knees. He seemed wonderful to her.

“Shhhh....” a whisper would come from one of the girls near by; “there’s Mr. Kent”; and all would watch him out of the corners of their eyes as they pretended to bend over their work.

“Mr. Kent is President of the Company?” Jeannette one day ventured to ask Mr. Beardsley.

“Oh, no, just the selling agent,” he replied. This was perplexing, but it did not make Jeannette regard with any less veneration the stocky figure in derby hat and flapping coat corners which strode in and out of the office.

There were other mysterious persons who had desks in the “holy of holies,” but Jeannette was never able to make out who these were, nor what might be their duties. Miss Gibson was in charge of the girls on the floor; Mr. Beardsley was her immediate “boss.” There was a cashier who made up the pay-roll and whose assistants handed out the little manila envelopes on Saturday morning containing the neatly folded bills. She had no occasion to be concerned about anyone else.

Her “boss’s” full name was Roy Beardsley. Roy! She smiled when she heard it. He was young,—twenty-three or-four; he was a recent Princeton graduate, was unmarried and lived in a boarding-house somewhere on Madison Avenue. She found out so much from the girls her second day at the office; they were glib with information concerning any one of the force.

Jeannette liked her young boss, principally because it soon became apparent that he treated her with a courtesy he did not accord the other girls. She was, after all, a “lady,” she told herself, straightening her shoulders a trifle, and he was sufficiently well-bred himself to recognize that fact. He must see, of course, the difference between herself and such girls as—well—as Miss Flannigan, for instance. But more than this, Jeannette grew daily more and more convinced that he was beginning to take a personal interest in her for which none of these considerations accounted. Nothing definite between them gave this justification. There was no word, no inflection of voice that had any significance, but she saw it in a quick glimpse of his blue eyes watching her as she sat beside his desk, in the smile of his strange little mouth that stretched itself tightly across his small teeth when he first greeted her in the day and wished her “good-morning.” Some strange thrilling of her pulses beset her as she sat near him. It irritated her; she struggled against it, even rose to her feet and went to her desk upon a manufactured excuse to check the subtle influence that began to steal upon her when she was near him. All her instincts battled against this upsetting something, whatever it was,—she could not identify it by a name—which began more and more to trouble her.

Jeannette was a normal, healthy girl budding into womanhood, with broadening horizons and rapidly increasing intimate associations with the world. She was growing daily more mature, more impressive in her bearing, and notably more beautiful. She was fully conscious of this. Her mirror told her so, the glances of men on the street contributed their evidence, the covert inspection of her own sex both in and out of the office confirmed it. She was becoming aware, too, of a growing self-confidence, of poise and power in herself that she had never suspected.

With what constituted “crushes,” “cases,” with what was implied in saying one was “smitten,” she was thoroughly familiar. To a confidant she would now have frankly described Roy Beardsley as having a “crush” on her. He was not the first youth of whom she could have truthfully said as much. Various boys at one time or another, during her school days, had slipped notes to her as they passed her desk, or shamblingly trailed her home after school, carrying her books for her, and had hung around the doorstep of the apartment house, loitering over their leave-taking, digging the toe of a shoe into the pavement, grinning foolishly. Some of them had confided to her that they “loved” her and asked her to promise to be their “girl.” She, herself, had had a “terrible case” on a vaudeville dancer named Maurice Monteagle, and on a youth of Greek extraction who worked in Bannerman’s Drug Store on the corner near her home, tended the soda-water counter there and whose name she never learned.

But in none of these affairs of her young heart had there been anything like this. She began by being somewhat flattered by Beardsley’s attention, and was guilty of provoking him a little at first with a smile and glance. Like all girls of her age, she had been willing, even anxious, to whip his interest into flame. But she soon grew frightened. There was now something in the air, something in herself she could not quite control; she could not still the sudden throbbing of her heart, the swimming of her senses. The moment came when she actually dreaded meeting him in the mornings, when the minutes she was obliged to sit beside his desk and listen to the peculiar little twang in his voice were an ordeal. She dared not lift her eyes to meet his, but she could see his long white fingers moving about on the desk, playing with pencil and pen, and she could feel him looking at her when his voice fell silent. These were the moments that disturbed her most, when she could not—not for the life of her—control the mounting color that began somewhere deep down within her, and swept up into her cheeks, over her temples, to the roots of her hair. She had to rest her hand against her note-book, to keep it from trembling. During these silences when she felt him studying her she sometimes thought she must scream or do something mad, unless he turned his eyes elsewhere. She seriously considered resigning and seeking another position.

§ 6

Jeannette drank deeply of satisfaction in being a wage-earner. She walked the streets of the city with a buoyant tread; she gazed with pride and affection into the eyes of other working girls she passed; she was self-supporting like them; she had something in common with each and every one of them; there was a great bond that drew them all together.

But while she felt thus affectionately sympathetic to these girls in the mass, no one of them drew the line of social distinction more rigidly, even more cruelly than did she, herself. She felt she was the superior of the vast majority of them, and the equal of the best. She might not be earning the salary perhaps some of them did who were private secretaries, but she was confident that she would. Her experience with stenography confirmed this self-confidence. With three weeks of actual practice the trick, the knack, the knowledge,—whatever it was,—had come to her of a sudden. Now she could sweep her pencil across the page of her note-book, leaving in its wake an easy string of curves, dots and dashes, setting them down automatically, keeping pace with even the swiftest of young Beardsley’s sentences. Nothing could stop her progress in the business world; she loved being of it, revelled in its atmosphere, realizing that she was cleverer than most men, shrewder, quicker, with the additional advantage of unerring intuition.

This new-born ambition told her to keep herself aloof from other working girls. Not that she had any inclination to associate with them; they offended her,—not only those in the office but the giggling, simpering girls she saw on the street, who were obviously of the same class, teetering along on ridiculously high heels, wearing imitation furs, and building their hair into enormous bulging pompadours. They were the kind who did not leave the offices where they worked at the noon hour but gathered in groups to eat their lunches out of cardboard boxes and left a litter of crumbs on the floor; they were the kind who crowded Childs’ restaurant, adding their shrill voices and shrieks to the deafening clatter of banging crockery.

Jeannette, feeling that it was a working girl’s privilege to become an habitué of Childs’, eagerly entered one of these restaurants at a noon hour during the early days of her employment. Accustomed as she had become to the din of an office, the noise in the eating place did not distress her. But she shrank from rubbing elbows with neighbors whose manner of feeding themselves horrified her. A study of the price card and an estimate of what she could buy for fifteen cents, the amount she decided she might properly allow herself for lunches, completed her dissatisfaction with the restaurant and similar places. She decided to go without lunch and to spend the leisure time of her noon-hour wandering up and down Fifth Avenue and Broadway, looking into shop windows,—- Lord & Taylor’s, Arnold Constable’s and even Tiffany’s on Union Square,—and in making tours of inspection through the aisles of Siegel-Cooper’s mammoth establishment on Sixth Avenue.

It was in the rotunda of this gigantic store, where stood a great golden symbolic figure of a laurel-crowned woman, that there was a large circular candy counter and soda fountain, and here the girl discovered one might get coffee, creamed and sugared, and served in a neat little flowered china cup, and two saltine crackers on the edge of the saucer, for a nickel. In time, this came to constitute her daily lunch. She could stand at the counter, sipping her drink, and nibbling the crackers at her ease, feeling inconspicuous and comfortable, presenting, she realized, merely the appearance of a lady shopper, who had taken a moment from her purchasing for a bit of refreshment.

The nourishment, slight as it was, proved sufficient. On the days she had gone lunchless, she had developed headaches late in the afternoon, but the coffee and crackers, she found, were enough to sustain her from a seven o’clock breakfast to dinner at six-thirty. A nickel for lunch, a dime for carfare—sometimes she walked downtown—took less than a dollar out of her weekly wage. That left fourteen dollars to spend as she liked. She gave her mother nine and kept five for clothes. Five dollars a week for new clothes! Her heart never failed to leap with joy at the thought. Five dollars a week to save or to spend for whatever she fancied! Oh, life was too wonderful! Just to exist these days and to plan how she would dress herself, and what else she would do with her earnings, filled her cup of joy to the brim.

Her little mother protested vehemently when she put nine dollars in crisp bills into her hand at the end of the first week of work.

“Oh—dearie! What’s this? ... What’s all this money for?”

“It’s what I’m going to give you every week, Mama.”

Mrs. Sturgis for a moment was speechless, gazing with wide eyes into her daughter’s smiling face. She wouldn’t accept it. She wouldn’t hear of such a thing. It was the child’s own money that she had earned herself and not one cent of it should go for any old stupid bills or household expenses. She shook her head until her round fat cheeks trembled like cupped jelly.

But Jeannette had her way, as she knew, and her mother knew, and admiring, exclaiming Alice knew she would from the first. That same evening, after the pots and pans and the supper dishes had been washed, Mrs. Sturgis established herself under the light at the dining-room table with the canvas-covered ledger before her and began to figure. Thirty-six dollars a month! Thirty-six dollars a month! Six times six? That was ...? Why, they’d almost be out of debt in six months! And they wouldn’t need to fall behind a cent during summer! It was wonderful! It was too—too wonderful! Tears filmed Mrs. Sturgis’ bright blue eyes; her glasses fogged so that she had to take them off and wipe them. She didn’t deserve such daughters! No woman ever had better girls!

They got laughing happily, excitedly over this, an hysterical sob threatening each. They kissed each other, the girls kneeling by their mother’s chair, their arms around one another, and clung together. And then Alice said she had half a mind to go to work, too, and do her share.

But there was an immediate outcry at this from both her mother and sister. What nonsense! What a foolish idea! She mustn’t think of such a thing! Just because Jeannette had given up her schooling and gone out into the world was no reason why both sisters should do it. There was not the slightest necessity. Alice’s place was at school and at home. Some one had to run the house; that was her contribution. She was fitted for it in every way: she was domestic, she liked to cook and she liked to clean.

A still more convincing argument that persuaded apologetic Alice that indeed she was quite wrong, and her mother and sister were entirely right, was voiced by Jeannette. Alice had much too retiring a nature to be a success in business. Assurance, self-assertiveness, even boldness were required, and Alice had none of these qualities. This was undeniably true; they all agreed to it. It seemed to be the last word on the matter; the topic was dismissed. Mrs. Sturgis went back to figuring on her bills; Jeannette to speculating about Roy Beardsley as she darned a tear in an old shirtwaist.

“I’ve often wondered,” ventured Alice after a considerable pause, “just what I should do,—how I could support myself if both of you happened to die. I mean—well, if Jeannette should go off somewhere,—to Europe, maybe,—and Mother should get sick, and I should have to....”

Her voice trailed off into silence before the astonished looks turned upon her.

“Well, upon my word ...” began Jeannette.

“Why, Alice dearie, what’s got into you?”

“You’re going to kill us both off,—is that it? I’m to run away and leave Mother sick on your hands?”

“I mean—well, I meant——” struggled the confused Alice.

“Dearie,” said her mother, “you won’t have to worry about the future. Mama’ll take care of you until some nice worthy young man comes along to claim you for his own.”

“You’ll be married, Allie dear, long before I will. You’re just the kind rich men fall madly in love with.”

“Oh, hush, Janny! ... please.”

But her sister’s thoughts were already upon a more engaging matter. She was busy once again with Roy Beardsley.

CHAPTER III

§ 1

Spring burst upon New York with a warm breath and a rush of green. The gentle season folded the city lovingly in its arms. Everywhere were the evidences of its magic presence. The trees shimmered with green, shrubbery that peeped through iron fence grillings vigorously put forth new leaves, patches of grass in the areaways of brownstone houses turned freshly verdant, hotels upon the Avenue took on a brave and festal aspect with blooming flower-boxes in their windows, florist shops exhaled delicate perfumes of field flowers and turned gay the sidewalks before their doors with rows of potted loveliness, the Park became an elysian field of soft invitingness, with emerald glades and vistas of enchantment like tapestries of Fontainebleau. Spring was evident in women’s hats, in shop windows, in the crowded tops of lumbering three-horse buses, in the reappearance of hansom cabs, in open automobiles, in the smiling faces of men and women, in the elastic step of pedestrians. Spring had come to New York; the very walls of houses and pavements of the streets flashed back joyously the golden caressing radiance of the sun.

Walking downtown to her office on an early morning through all this exhilarating loveliness, stepping along with almost a skip in her gait and a heart that danced to her brisk strides, Jeannette felt rather than saw a man’s shadow at her elbow and turned to find Roy Beardsley beside her, lifting his hat, and smiling at her with his tight little mouth, his blue eyes twinkling.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, her fingers pressed hard against her heart. She had been thinking of him almost from the moment she had left home.

“Morning.... You don’t mind if I walk along? ... It’s a wonderful morning; isn’t it glorious?”

“Oh, my, yes,—it’s glorious.” She had herself in hand by another moment and could return his smile. They had never stood near one another before, and the girl noticed he was half-a-head shorter than herself. There were other things the matter with him, seen thus upon the street while other men were passing, and with his hat on! Jeannette could not determine just what they were. Glancing at him furtively as they walked together down the Avenue, she was conscious of a vague disappointment.

“Do you walk downtown every morning?” he asked.

“Oh, sometimes. How did you happen to be up this way so early?”

“I take a stroll through the Park occasionally. It’s wonderful now.”

“Yes, it’s very beautiful.”

“I think New York’s the loveliest place in the world in spring.”

“Well, I guess it is,” she agreed.

“And you have to go through a long wet winter like this last one to appreciate it.”

“Yes, I think you do.”

“I thought we’d never get rid of the snow.”

“They clean the streets up awfully quickly though;—don’t you think so?”

“Yes, they have a great system here.”

“The poor horses have a terrible time when it’s slippery.”

“There was a big electric hansom cab stuck in the snow for four days in front of the place where I live. They had to dig it out,” he said.

“It makes the spring all the more enjoyable when the change comes.”

“Yes, the people seem to take a personal pride in the weather.”

“It’s as though they had something to do with it themselves.”

“That’s right I noticed it the first year I was here.”

“You’re not a New Yorker, then?”

“Oh, no; my home’s in San Francisco. I only came East three years ago to go to college.”

“I thought you were ... one of the girls at the office mentioned you were a Princeton man.”

“I was, but I ... well, I flunked out at Christmas. I was tired of college, anyway. I wanted to go into newspaper work, but I couldn’t get a job with any of the metropolitan dailies, so temporarily I am trying to help sell the Universal History of the World.”

They talked at random, the man inclined to give more of his personal history; the girl, pretending indifference, commented on the steady encroachment of stores upon these sacred fastnesses, the homes of the rich. She interrupted him with an exclamation every now and then, to point out some object of interest on the street, or something in a shop window.

It was thrilling to be walking together down the brilliant Avenue in the soft, morning sunshine. They paused at Madison Square before beginning to weave their way through the traffic of the street, and striking across the Park, gay with beds of yellow tulips, trees budding into leaf, and fountains playing. Roy put his hand under the girl’s forearm to guide her. The touch of his fingers burnt, and set her pulses thrilling. She pointedly disengaged herself, withdrawing her arm, when they reached the farther side of the Avenue.

Crossing the Square, she glanced at him critically once more. He seemed absurdly young,—a mere college boy with his cloth hat at a youthful angle, his slim young shoulders sharply outlined in the belted jacket. It was possible he was a few years her senior, but she felt vastly older.

He was commenting on the portentous date, May first, when the price of the History was to advance. The company had somehow succeeded in postponing the fateful day for two weeks, and the public was to have a fortnight longer in which to take advantage of the low prices.

“... and after that, no one knows what will happen. Perhaps we’ll all lose our jobs.”

“Oh,—do you really think so?” Jeannette was aghast.

“Well, some of us will go; they can’t continue to keep that mob on the pay-roll. I don’t think they’ll let you go, though, you’re such a dandy stenographer. I shall certainly recommend them to keep you, but I doubt if they’ll have any further use for me. They’ll let me out, all right.”

He smiled whimsically. It was this whimsical smile the girl found so appealing and so—so disconcerting.

“I shall be sorry if that happens,” she said slowly.

“Will you?”

“Why, of course.”

“But will you be really sorry if—if I’m no longer there?”

“We-ll,—it will be hard getting used to someone else’s dictation; I’m accustomed to yours now.”

“Yes,—I’ll be sorry to go,” he said after a moment. “I like the work, after a fashion, ... but, of course, it isn’t getting me anywhere. I want to write; I’ve always been interested in that. If I could get any kind of work on a newspaper or a magazine, it would suit me fine. My father’s awfully sore at me for being dropped at Princeton. He’s a minister, you know,”—Beardsley laughed deprecatingly with a glance at his companion’s face,—“and he didn’t like it a little bit. I didn’t want to go back home like—well—like the prodigal son, so I wrote him I’d get a job in New York, and see what I could do for myself.”

“I see,” the girl said with another swift survey of his clean features and tight, quaint smile. There was an extraordinary quality about him; he was pathetic somehow; she felt oddly sorry for him.

“I’d like to make good for my father’s sake.... He’s only got his salary.”

“I see,” she repeated.

“But summer’s the deuce of a time to get a job on a newspaper or magazine in New York, everybody tells me.... I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get something.”

Jeannette wondered what she would do herself. She had begun to enjoy so thoroughly her daily routine, and to take such pride in herself! ... Well, it would be too bad....

They had reached the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street where the ground was torn up in all four directions, and hardly passable.

“I’ll say a prayer of thankfulness when they get this subway finished, and stop tearing up the streets,” Jeannette remarked.

Once again Roy caught her elbow to help her over the pile of débris, across the skeleton framework of exposed tracks, and again the girl felt the touch of his young fingers like points of flame upon her arm. She caught a shining look in his eyes. Love leaped at her from their blueness. A moment’s giddiness seized her, and there came a terrifying feeling that something dreadful was about to happen, that she and this boy at her side were trembling on the brink of some dreadful catastrophe. Instinct rose in her, strong, combative. She turned abruptly into the open door of a candy shop and steadied herself as she bought a dime’s worth of peppermints.

Emotions, burning, chilling, conflicting, took possession of her the rest of the day. From her typewriter table she covertly studied Beardsley, as he leaned back in his armed swivel-chair before his flat-topped desk, his fingers loosely linked together across his chest, his eyes unseeing, fixed on some distant point through the window’s vista, dictating to the stenographer who bent over her note-book, as she scribbled beside him. What was it about him that moved her so strangely? What was it in his twinkling blue eyes, his quaint mouth with its whimsical smile that stirred her, and set her senses swimming? He was in love with her. Perhaps it was just because he cared so much that she was thus deeply stirred. There had been others, she reminded herself, who had been in love with her, but they had awakened no such emotion.

Had she come to care herself?

She asked the question with a beating heart. Was this love,—the feeling about which she had speculated so long? Love,—the great love? Was she to meet her fate so soon? Was her adventure among men to be so soon over? Was this all there was to it? The first man she met? She and Roy Beardsley?

She denied it vehemently. No, it was nonsense,—it was ridiculous! Roy Beardsley was a boy,—a mere youth who had been dropped from college. She would not permit herself to become interested in him. It was preposterous,—absurd!

She assured herself she would have no difficulty in controlling her emotion in future, but the emotion itself continued to puzzle her. What was it, she felt for this man? Was she in love,—really in love,—in love at last? She looked at him a long time. She wondered.

§ 2

That he would meet her on the Avenue next morning she felt was almost certain. She said to herself a hundred times it would be much wiser for her to take the elevated train, or at least to walk down another street and avoid the possibility of such an encounter. If she were not to permit herself to become further interested, it was obvious she must see him as little as possible. But when morning came it was into Fifth Avenue she turned.... She felt so sure of herself; she wanted to see if he would really be there.

Once or twice she thought she recognized his distant figure coming toward her. Each time her heart came into her throat. She stopped and made a pretense of studying a milliner’s window, while she wrestled with herself. She was mad, she was a fool, she had no business to let herself play with fire this way! At the next corner she would turn eastward, and go down Fourth Avenue. But when she reached the cross street she decided to walk just one more block, and in that interval he stepped from a doorway where he had been watching for her, and joined her.

“Good-morning.”

“Oh—hello!”

The sudden sight of him, the sound of his voice affected her like fright. She hurried on, trying to still the pounding in her breast, turning her face toward the traffic in the street to hide her confusion.

“What’s the hurry?” he laughed. “It isn’t half past eight yet.”

“I have a personal letter to type before office hours,” Jeannette said abstractedly, but she lessened her pace.

“I love these early walks on the Avenue,” he said.

“I always walk down if I have time,” she replied. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.” She gave him a quick inspection. He was insignificant,—he had a weak, effeminate expression,—his features were small and lacked resolution. And yet it was the same face with its blue eyes, always brightly alight, its twisted mouth and thin lips stretched tightly over his small, glittering, even teeth when he smiled, that haunted her through the day, pursued her to her home, gleamed at her from the blackness of her room after she had gone to bed, visited her in her dreams, and greeted her with its irresistible charm when she awoke in the mornings. She loved that irresolute face, with all its weakness, its curious eccentricities; she loved the grace of that slight boyish figure with its square, bony shoulders, its tapering, slim waist; she loved those thin, almost emaciated white wrists, and those long chalk-hued hands and attenuated fingers. She loved the way he bore himself, the poise of his figure, the lithesomeness and suppleness of his young body. And she despised herself for loving, and hated him for the emotion he stirred in her. She wanted to kiss him, she wanted to kill him, she wanted him in her arms, she wanted never to see him again; she wanted him to be madly, desperately in love with her, and she wanted herself to be coldly indifferent.

The spring sunlight flooded the Avenue gloriously; the green omnibuses, dragged by three horses harnessed abreast, rambled up and down; cabs teetered on their high wheels, and weaved their way through the traffic at a smart clip-clap; hurrying women, with the trimming of their flowered hats nodding to their energetic gait bustled upon their early morning errands; stores were being opened, shirt-sleeved porters were noisily folding the iron gates before the doors back into their daytime positions; shop-girls, and stenographers, briskly on their way to their offices, half smiled at one another as they passed.

It was impossible not to respond to the infectious quality that was in the air. Jeannette laughed happily into her companion’s face, and he gazed at her eagerly, his eyes shining, his mouth twisted into its whimsical smile. They were exhilarated, they were enthralled, they were oblivious to everything in the world except themselves.

He stopped her abruptly, a block from the office.

“I think perhaps ... I believe you would prefer it, Miss Sturgis, if—if you and I ... if you were not seen entering the building, with—with an escort. It might be easier, pleasanter for you, if I....”

He hesitated, floundering helplessly. They stood still a moment facing one another, each thinking of impossible things to say. Then Beardsley murmured: “Well ...” lifted his hat, and she put her hand in his. He held it tightly in the firm grip of his thin white fingers, until she had to free it. She laughed shakily, as she turned away.

“That was really very nice of him,” she thought as she hurried on. “That was really very nice. I shan’t mind walking with him occasionally, if it doesn’t set the office gossiping.”

§ 3

Love swept them tumultuously onward. There was no time to pause, to consider, no time to calculate, none to take stock of one’s self. In a week Jeannette Sturgis and Roy Beardsley were friends, in ten days they were lovers. Every morning he met her on the Avenue and walked with her to within a block of the office, and in the evening he joined her for the tramp homeward. He begged her again and again to lunch with him but to this she would not agree. They knew they loved each other now, but dared not speak of it. He was diffident, eager to ingratiate himself with her, fearful of her displeasure; and she,—while she confessed her love to herself,—passionately resolved he should never guess it nor persuade her to acknowledge it. She had an unreasonable primitive dread of what might follow if Roy should speak. Their love was all too sweet as it was. She did not want to risk spoiling it, and trembled at the thought of its avowal.

Yet in her heart she knew what must inevitably happen. Their attraction for one another was stronger than either; it was rushing them both headlong down the swift current of its precipitous course.

On the very day the words were trembling on her lover’s lips came the staggering announcement that on the fifteenth day of May the activities of the Soulé Publishing Company in selling the Universal History of the World would cease, and the services of all employees would terminate on that date.

The girls told Jeannette the news the moment she arrived at the office, and she found it confirmed on a slip of paper in an envelope on her typewriting table.

“All? Every one?” she asked blankly. She had confidently expected that she would be kept on,—for a month at least.

“Well, that’s what they say; Mr. Beardsley, Miss Gibson,—everybody.”

“Oh,” murmured Jeannette, betraying her disappointment.

“Did you think they’d keep you on the pay-roll after the rest of us were fired?” asked Miss Flannigan airily.

Jeannette perceptibly straightened herself and levelled a cool glance at the girl.

“Perhaps,” she admitted.

“Oh-h,—is that so?” mimicked Miss Flannigan. “Well, you got another think coming,—didn’t you?”

Jeannette drowned the words by attacking her machine, her fingers flying, the warning ping of the tiny bell sounding at half-minute intervals. But her heart was lead within her, and her throat tightened convulsively. She was going to lose her job! She was going to be thrown out of work! She was going to be among the unemployed again! Her mother! ... And Alice! ... That precious five dollars a week that was all her own!

The rest of the day was dreary, interminable. Demoralization was in the air. The girls whispered openly among themselves, and filtered by twos and threes to the dressing-room, where they congregated and gossiped. The spring sunshine grew stale, and poured brazenly through the west windows. Miss Flannigan chewed gum incessantly as she giggled noisily over confidences with a neighbor. Even Beardsley seemed to have lost interest for Jeannette.

Yet when she came to his desk later in the day for the usual dictation, he handed her a paper on which he had written:

“You mustn’t be downhearted. There is always a demand for good stenographers. You won’t have the slightest difficulty in getting another job. I wish I was as sure of one myself. May I walk home with you this evening?”

She gave him no definite answer but she liked him for his encouragement and sympathy. Whenever she sat near his desk, note-book in hand, waiting for him to dictate to her, he was to her a superior being, one whose judgment and perception were above her own; he was her “boss.” It was different when she met him outside the office; he was just a boy then,—a boy who had flunked out of college. Now he, too, had lost his job. Like her, he would soon be unemployed. No longer need she fear his possible censure of her work, or take pleasure in his praise of it. She realized he had lost weight with her.

After office hours that evening, he met her outside the building and as he walked home with her was full of philosophical counsel.

“Why, Miss Sturgis, it’s never hard for a girl to get a job, —a,girl who’s got a profession, and who’s shown herself to be a first-rate stenographer. The offices downtown are just crazy to get hold of girls like you. You won’t have the slightest difficulty in finding another position.... If you were me, you’d have something to worry about. I’ve got to get a job that will land me somewhere,—a job in which I can rise to something better.”

“But so have I,” said Jeannette.

“Well, yes, I know.... But girls’re different. They only want a job for a little while,—a year, two or three years perhaps, and then they get married. Working for girls is only a sort of stop-gap.”

“No, it isn’t; not always. There’s many a girl who perhaps doesn’t regard matrimony with such awful importance as you men think. I mean girls who aren’t thinking about marriage at all, and who really want to become smart, capable business women.”

Roy smiled deprecatingly. “But I’m talking about the average girl,” he said.

“And so am I. Girls have a right to be economically independent, and I can’t see why they have to stop working just because they marry,—any more than men do.”

“Girls have to stay home and run the house.”

“Oh, what nonsense!” cried Jeanette. “It’s no more her home than it is the man’s.”

Roy shrugged his slight shoulders. He had no desire to argue with her. He was more concerned with the thought that in the future there would be no office to bring them together daily.

“There are only two days more. Saturday we get our last pay envelope.”

They walked on in silence.

“I hope you’ll let me come to see you. We’ve become such good friends. I’d hate to....”

He left the sentence awkwardly unfinished.

“Oh,—I’d like to have you call some evening,” she said with apparent indifference. “I’d like to have you meet my mother and sister.”

“I’d love to.... I want to know them both.”

“Well, come Sunday,—to—to dinner. We have it at one o’clock. I suppose it’s really lunch, but we’re awfully old-fashioned and we always have our Sunday dinner in the middle of the day.... You mustn’t expect much; we live very simply.”

“Thanks, awfully....”

“We don’t keep any servant, you know.”

“I quite understand. You’re very good to invite me.”

“I’m sure my mother and sister will be glad to meet you.”

“I’m awfully anxious to know them.”

“Well, come Sunday.”

“You bet I will.”

“Of course, they’ve heard about ‘Mr. Beardsley.’”

“Have they? ... Do you talk about me sometimes to them?”

“Why, of course! ... Naturally.... What do you expect?”

“I hope you’ve given me a good character.”

“I daresay they think you’re an old bald-headed man with a thick curly beard.”

“Oh, no! ... They’ll be terribly disappointed!”

“I’m going to tell them you’re a gruff old codger with a perpetual grouch.”

“Miss Sturgis,—please!”

They were both laughing hilariously.

“Here’s your home. I had no idea we had walked so far.... Shall I see you to-morrow? I’ll be waiting at the Seventy-second Street entrance to the Park.”

“All right.”

“At eight o’clock?”

She nodded, waved her hand to him, and ran up the stone steps. He waited until she had fitted her key into the lock, and the heavy glass-panelled door had closed behind her.

§ 4

Saturday was their first intimate little meal by a window in a café. It had been their last morning at the office, and by noon the activities of the Soulé Publishing Company in selling the Universal History of the World had ceased. Pay envelopes had been distributed shortly after eleven, and an hour later all the little Jewesses with their absurd pompadours and high heels, the Misses Rosens and Flannigans, the office clerks and office boys had packed the great elevators for the last time, laughing and squeezing together, and swarmed out of the building not to return. And Roy and Jeannette were among them.

“You will go to lunch with me?” he had written on a sheet of paper and pushed toward her as she sat at his elbow. “I’ve got a lot of things to talk to you about, and it’s our last day here together.”

She had tried to consider the matter dispassionately, but a glimpse of his bright, eager eyes fixed on her had sent the blood flooding her neck and cheeks, and before she quite knew what she had done she had nodded.

He joined her at the street entrance and together they made a happy progress toward Broadway.

A great felicity descended upon them. Their senses thrilled to the beauty of the warm day and their being thus together. Roy piloted her through the hurrying noontime throng, his hand about her arm. She tingled again at the touch of his fingers, and loved it. Then they entered the café of a hotel, and found a cozy table for two by the window where, dazzled and enthralled by their great happiness, they smiled into one another’s eyes across the white cloth, glittering with cutlery and glasses.

Love was wonderful! He loved her; she loved him. They both knew it; they were drunk with the thought. This was their adventure,—theirs and theirs alone!

“I may have to go home this summer,” Roy said with a troubled air after he had given their order to the waiter. He stared at the winding crowd that surged back and forth beneath their window. “But I’m coming back right away. In August.”

“You mean to San Francisco?”

“My father wants me to come West for a month or two. He sent me my ticket.... I guess he expects me to settle down out there. Of course he wants me to. The ticket is only a one-way one. But he’s in for a disappointment. I can’t be happy in San Francisco; I want to come back to New York.”

They both fell silent, thinking their own thoughts. Jeannette was conscious of the dreariness and drabness of life once more; it was disheartening and depressing to be unemployed. All these people hurrying past the window, she reflected, were intent upon some particular errand; each one had a job; the whole world had jobs but herself. There would be nothing for her to do but “apply for employment.”

“Please can you give me a position? ... Excuse me, sir, I’m looking for work.... Could you use a stenographer?”

Oh, it was detestable, it was intolerable! It dragged her pride in the dust! ... And there would be no one to sympathize, to advise her,—or help her! She would be alone all summer in New York with no one interested!

Roy, watching her, guessed her thoughts.

“I’m coming back....”

She flushed warmly.

“Would you like me to come back? Would it make any difference to you, if I did? If you’ll just say you’d like me to come back, I will; ... I’ll promise! ... Will you?”

The girl bent over her plate, hiding her face with the brim of her hat. The giddiness she had experienced that day in the street threatened her.

“Would you want me to come back?” Roy insisted.

She raised her eyes and met his gaze; he held them with the burning intentness of his own, and for a long, long moment they stared at one another.

“You know I love you,” he said tensely.

His lip quivered; his face was aglow.

“I love you with every fibre of my being! I’ll come back to you,—I’ll come back from the ends of the earth. Only just say you love me, too, Jeannette.... You do love me, don’t you? ... You’re the most wonderful girl I’ve ever known, Jeannette! ... God, Jeannette, you’re just wonderful!”

Why was it that in the supreme moment of his great avowal he seemed a little ridiculous to her? She felt suddenly like laughing. He was so absurdly young, so juvenile, so school-boyish, leaning toward her across the table in his youthful Norfolk jacket, with his unruly hair sticking up on top his head!

§ 5

He kissed her when they parted from one another late that afternoon. They had been absorbed in talk, and the hours slipped by until before they were aware it was five o’clock. He walked home with her and just inside the heavy glass doors of the old-fashioned apartment house where she lived he put his arms about her, their faces came close together, and for the briefest of moments their lips met. It was a shy kiss, hardly more than a touch of mouth to mouth. For another moment they stood raptly gazing into each other’s eyes, their fingers interlocked. Then Jeannette fled, running up the stairs, nor did she grant him another look, even when she reached the landing above and had to turn. But on the third flight of stairs she paused, held her breath to still the noise of her panting, and listened. There was nothing. A cautious glance over the balustrade down through the narrow well of the stairs revealed his shadow on the stone flagging below. She sank to the step, and waited to catch her breath, her ears strained for a sound. Presently she heard him moving; there was a crisp clip of his shoes; she guessed he was searching the gloom of the stairwell for a glimpse of her. But she would not look, and sat motionless with tightly clasped hands. After a long interval she heard his hesitating step again. The half-opened door swung slowly back, brightening the hallway below a moment with yellow daylight from the street, then closed with a dull jangle of heavy glass. She sat for a moment more, then a tiny choking sound burst from between her close-shut lips, and she buried her glowing face in her hot hands, pressing her fingertips hard against her eyeballs until the force of them hurt her.

§ 6

That night Jeannette experienced all the exquisite joy and fierce agony of young love. It was an exhausting ordeal; she lived over and over the thrilling hours of the day that had terminated in that glorious, intoxicating second when the boy’s thin lips were against her own, and she had felt their warm, tingling pressure. The recollection brought to her wave upon wave of hot flushes that began somewhere deep down inside her being and flooded her with ecstasy. She strove against it, yet had no wish to control her thoughts. Shame,—some curious sense of wrong,—distressed her. It was not right;—it was all wrong! Instinct grappled with desire. She wept deliciously, convulsively, burying her head in her pillow and pressing its smothering softness against her mouth to stifle her sobbing breath that neither her mother nor Alice might hear it. Past midnight she rose and went noiselessly to the bathroom where she washed her face, carefully brushed and re-braided her hair. Her head ached and her swollen eyes were hot and painful. But she felt calmer. She studied her face for a long moment in the battered mirror that hung above the wash-stand, and as she looked a great quivering breath was wrung from her.

“Roy ... I can’t ... it can never be ... never, never be,” she whispered despairingly to her image.

For the moment she felt triumphant. She had conquered something, she did not know what. She dimmed the gaslight and found her way back to bed. Sleep came mercifully, and she did not wake until her mother kissed her the next morning.

§ 7

It was Sunday, the day he had promised to come to dinner. Dinner, with the Sturgises on Sunday, was always the noontime meal. Cold meat or a levy on Kratzmer’s delicatessen counters, with weak hot tea, constituted Sunday supper. Dinner, however, invariably involved roast chicken and ice cream which was secured at the last moment from O’Day’s Candy Parlor, and carried home by one of the girls, packed in a thin pasteboard box. There was seldom ice in the leaky ice-box, and Sunday dinner was therefore usually a hurried affair, as mother and the girls were always acutely conscious during every minute of its duration of the melting cream in the kitchen.

For this Mrs. Sturgis was responsible. Her frugality would not allow her leisurely to enjoy her meal at the sacrifice of the ice cream. The fear of its becoming soft and mushy pressed relentlessly upon her consciousness.

“Now, dearie,—don’t talk! Eat your dinner. It’s much more digestible if it’s eaten while it’s hot,” she would urge her daughters almost with every mouthful.

No one ever spoke of the ice cream itself. The reason for such close application to the business of eating was never voiced. It was part of the ritual of Sunday dinner that it should not be mentioned. Not until Alice had piled and crowded the aluminum tray with the soiled dishes, carried these away, and returned with the mound of cream sagging upon its platter, could Mrs. Sturgis and her daughters allow themselves to relax. No matter how well the rest of the dinner might be cooked, it must be gulped down and its enjoyment wasted for the sake of a quarter’s worth of frozen cream.

It was upon these circumstances that Jeannette’s rebellious thoughts centered on the morning of Roy Beardsley’s visit. She was worn out after her troubled night, and the prospect of seeing him so soon after the tremendous occurrences of the previous afternoon and her stormy reflections upon them made her nervous, apprehensive. She wanted time to think things out, to consider matters.... Anyhow—what would her mother and sister think of him? What would he think of them?

“Dearie—dearie!” Mrs. Sturgis expostulated more than once. “Whatever makes my lovie so cross this morning? ... You’ll get another position, dearie,—if that’s what’s troubling you.”

“Oh, you make me tired!” thought her daughter, angrily, though the words were unsaid.

“Well, I do hope we can at least have some other kind of dessert,” she said aloud. “We always have to rush so infernally through dinner; it makes me sick! ... Or, I’ll tell you what,” she went on hopefully, “we can get in a little ice.”

“It will leak all over the floor,” Alice objected. “The old thing is full of holes.”

“There’s nothing better than O’Day’s strawberry cream,” Mrs. Sturgis declared; “and there isn’t a thing in the house, so I can’t make a pudding.”

Jeannette said nothing further but gloomed in silence. She elected to be furiously energetic, and undertook a thorough cleaning of the studio, strewing strips of damp newspaper over the floor, sweeping vigorously, her head tied up in a towel. The broom shed its straw, and she discovered little triangles of dirt in obscure corners which Alice had evidently deliberately neglected. The white curtains were dingy, the front windows needed washing, and in the midst of her cleaning, Dikron Najarian came in upon her to ask her to walk with him in the afternoon. In a fury she attempted to move the piano to pull loose a rug, and in the effort, which was far beyond her strength, she hurt herself badly. Her mother found her lying on the floor, crying weakly.

“Dearie—dearie! What happened to you! My darling! You shouldn’t work so hard; there’s no necessity for your being so thorough.”

The girl had really injured herself. Mrs. Sturgis called wildly for Alice, and between them they carried her to her room and laid her on her bed. She had wrenched her back, but she refused to admit it. She wouldn’t be put to bed. She was all right, she told them; just a few moments’ rest, and she would be herself again. It was twelve o’clock and Roy would be there at one!

She lay on her bed, and gazed blindly up at the old familiar discolored ceiling; presently her eyes closed and two large tears stole from under her lashes and rolled down her cheeks. She knew she had hurt herself far more seriously than she would let her mother or sister suspect. Something had given way in the small of her back; she made an effort to sit up, and the pain all but tore a cry from her. But she was determined they should not know; she would get up, and meet Roy, and go through with dinner as though nothing was the matter!

Struggling, with tiny explosions of pent-up breath and smothered groans, her hand at every free moment pressed to her side, she managed to dress herself. The effort exhausted her; a film of perspiration covered her forehead, her upper lip and the backs of her hands. She steadied herself now and then by leaning against the dresser, until her strength came back to her. She did not care, now, whether Roy Beardsley found the studio clean or not, whether or not he was hustled through dinner, thought her home cheap and poor, her mother and sister commonplace and fussily solicitous.

He was ahead of time. She met him with careful step and a fixed smile of welcome. He was glowing with eagerness; his hands trembled a little as he held them out to her. At sight of him, a moment’s wave of yesterday’s emotion swept over her, but immediately there came a sharp stab of pain, and she caught a quick breath from between the lips that held her smile. His anxious questions were cut short by the bustling entrance of Mrs. Sturgis and Alice.

Jeannette’s mother was at once flatteringly hospitable, inviting the guest to sit down and make himself comfortable, while she established herself with an elegant spread of skirts on the davenport, and began to toss the lacy ruffles of her best jabot with a careless finger.

Were Mr. Beardsley’s parents living? Ah, yes,—in San Francisco. They had fogs out there a great deal, she’d heard. And he had lost his mother. Consumption? Ah, that was indeed a pity! ... And his father was a clergyman? Eminently laudable profession.... And he had wanted to come East to college? Quite right and proper. Princeton was a fine college; nice boys went there.... And he had spent some time in New York? Wonderful city,—but a very expensive place to live,—probably the most expensive in the world....

Jeannette recognized a favorite theme and broke in with an inquiry about dinner. She was suffering miserably; she wondered if she would have the strength to get to the dining-room. Alice already had disappeared; the slam of the back door some moments before had announced her departure for O’Day’s Candy Parlor. Mrs. Sturgis excused herself with many profuse explanations, and departed kitchenward, whence presently there came the bang of pots in the sink and the hiss of running water.

Left together, Roy turned eagerly to Jeannette where she stood beside the mantel, a white hand gripping its edge.

“Dearest, I’ve been so crazy to see you! ... Is anything wrong? You’re not angry with me after yesterday?”

Her eyes softened, but, as if to check for that day any moment’s tenderness, there was again a sharp twinge. Involuntarily she winced.

“Jeannette! You’re not well! What’s the matter?”

She laid her hand on his arm to reassure him and steady herself.

“Nothing,” she breathed. “I hurt my back this morning. I must have wrenched it. It’s really nothing. Now and then it gets me.”

She managed a disarming smile.

“Mother and Allie mustn’t know a thing about it. I don’t want to alarm them; they’re so excitable. To-morrow, I’ll be quite all right again.... You must help me.”

“Why, surely; you know I will.... But, dearest——”

“Oh, please! Don’t make a fuss.” Her tone was sharp, and at once he fell silent, watching her face anxiously.

“Do you love me?” he queried in a low voice.

She did not answer; she was in no mood for love-making. In a moment, she moved with difficulty to the window, and stood there, fighting her pain, and looking down vacantly into the street. Provokingly, tears rose to her eyes. She was afraid she was going to cry. She could see Allie returning with the square paper box held with a finger by its thin wire handle, and presently the great front door of the house shut with a jangle.

Roy’s arm stole about her waist, but its touch hurt her.

“Oh, please!” she begged crossly.

“I’m sorry,—awfully sorry. I forgot.... You’re in terrible pain, aren’t you? ... Shall I get a doctor? ... Don’t you want to lie down? ... Would you like me to go?”

She wanted to slap him.

“Just leave me alone!”

Mrs. Sturgis’ eager step was approaching, and in a moment she presented at the doorway a face reddened from the heat of the stove, and moist with perspiration.

“Dinner’s ready, dearie,” she announced. “Won’t you come this way, Mr. Beardsley? We use our bedrooms for a passage-way, although the hall outside, I suppose, is really better, but, you see, it’s much more convenient....”

Jeannette motioned him to precede her, and followed, holding on by the furniture as she made her way. Her mother was in the kitchen and Alice’s back was turned as in anguish she got into her chair.

Dinner was endless. The soup had curdled; the potatoes were scant; the salt-cellar in front of Roy had a greenish mold about its top; Roy, himself, kept fiddling with his silverware,—rattling knife and fork, and fork and spoon; her mother and sister had never, in Jeannette’s opinion, jumped up from the table so incessantly for errands to kitchen or sideboard. The pain in her back every now and then became excruciating. She sat through the dragging meal with a set smile upon her lips, turning her head with assumed brightness from face to face as each one spoke. Her mother did most of the talking, keeping up a continual flow of chatter to fill the silences. Alice rarely volunteered an observation when there was company, and Jeannette’s misery made her dumb. Mrs. Sturgis rose to the occasion and supplied conversation for all three. Jeannette, watching Roy’s face, resented his polite show of interest. Her mother had what her daughters described as a “company” manner. When it was upon her she interrupted herself every little while with nervous giggles and to-day, Jeannette decided, she had never indulged in them so often. She was eloquent during the meal with reminiscences of her childhood’s escapades and early cuteness, and Jeannette watched the animated face with its jogging, pendent cheeks in an agony of spirit that matched her physical misery.

“... Nettie,—we always called Janny, ‘Nettie,’ when she was little,—was only six then, and she was awfully pretty and cute. We were having dinner at a restaurant downtown,—her papa had a friend to entertain. Allie....? I don’t remember where Allie was....”; Mrs. Sturgis gazed in sudden perplexity at her younger daughter. “I guess you were at home with Nora, lovie.... At any rate, we were at this restaurant and a waiter was serving us nicely, and nobody was paying any attention, when all of a sudden Nettie says loud and pertly to the waiter: ‘Now that you’re up, will you please get me a glass of milk?’” Mrs. Sturgis shut her eyes and laughed until her little round cheeks shook. “Imagine,” she finished, “‘Now that you’re up!’ ... To the waiter!” She went off into gales of mirth.

Roy laughed too, a thin, polite laugh, without a trace of spontaneity. Jeannette hated him. She hated her sister, too, for her smug complacency. Alice sat there encouraging her mother with responsive twitterings every time Mrs. Sturgis threw her head back to chuckle. Jeannette felt she was suffocating; the pain dug itself steadily and cruelly into the small of her back; she could not draw one adequate breath.

The platter and remains of the hacked and dismembered chicken, and the soiled dishes eventually were removed; Alice brushed the table-cloth with a folded napkin, sweeping crumbs and litter, ineffectually, as Jeannette noted in utter desolation, into the palm of her hand, carrying the refuse handful by handful to the kitchen, until the operation was complete. The ice cream was borne in, in mushy disintegration, and her mother commented on its melted condition and the various responsible reasons, until the girl thought she would scream in protest.

She could not eat; she could not drink; lifting her hand to her lips was misery. Roy’s solicitous glance was more and more intently fixed upon her; Alice, also, was beginning to send concerned looks in her direction. She felt her strength rapidly ebbing from her. She could endure but little more—but little, little more. Her will power was deserting her, resolution forsaking her, she felt it going—going; it was slipping away ... she was going to fall! ... Ah, she WAS falling....!

“Janny, dearie!” Her mother’s alarmed cry faintly reached her dimming consciousness.

CHAPTER IV

§ 1

The following summer was one of the hottest on record in New York City. The thermometer persistently hung around ninety, and the newspapers gave daily accounts of deaths and prostrations. Thousands of East-siders sought Coney Island and the cool beaches to spend their nights upon the sands. Thunderstorms brought but temporary relief. Jeannette, slowly regaining strength and energy, declared she had never known so many violent thunderstorms in the space of one short summer. She hated the vivid, blinding darts and the cracking ear-splitting detonations. She could reason convincingly with herself that there was but the minutest atom of danger, yet the menacing crashes never failed to bring her heart into her mouth and make her wince.

She had been in bed four weeks since the Sunday Roy had dined with the family, and she had fainted at the table. The doctor, when he arrived, had declared, after careful examination, that several ligaments had been torn from the bone, and the muscles of her back had been badly strained. She had been tightly bandaged with long strips of adhesive tape, and put to bed in her mother’s room, where she had lain for a month, rebellious and raging, at the mercy of a horde of disturbing thoughts.

Roy sent flowers, a box of candy, magazines. He wrote her long letters in a boyish hand in which he boyishly expressed his concern for her condition, his earnest hope of her speedy recovery, his tremendous devotion. It was for the last that she eagerly looked when she unfolded his scrawled pages. But his words never seemed to satisfy her wholly; they were never vehement enough. She longed for something more vigorous, aggressive, violent.

At the end of ten days he begged to be allowed to come to see her. There was no reason why he shouldn’t, Jeannette reflected, but she could not bring herself to the point of asking her mother to arrange for the visit. She did manage to say, with a light air of ridicule, one morning, when Mrs. Sturgis brought her breakfast tray to her bedside:

“Roy’s got the nerve to want to come to see me.”

“Why don’t you let him, dearie,—if you’d like it? He seems a right nice young fellow, and you could put on your dressing sacque, and Alice could do your hair.... I’ll be home to-morrow,—all day, you know. It would be quite right and proper.”

But the girl only made a grimace.

“That kid! That rah-rah boy! ... He thinks he’s got an awful case.”

“Why do you treat Mr. Beardsley so mean, Janny?” Alice asked her a few days later, closely studying her face. “You know,” she continued slowly, “sometimes I think you’re really in love with him.”

“Love!” cried her sister. “Hah! with that kid?”

“I think he’s terribly attractive, Janny.”

“Half baked!” Jeannette said scornfully.

“Well, I think he’s charming.”

“You can have him!”

“Oh, Janny! ... You’re dreadful!”

But in the dark nights Jeannette would kiss the scrawled writing, press the stiff note-paper to her cheek, and let her thoughts carry her back to their first meeting, their first encounter on the Avenue, their first kiss in the hallway downstairs, their memorable lunch together....

Ah, it was beautiful? It was all so very beautiful,—so infinitely beautiful! Every glance, every word, every moment! She loved him! She could not deny it. Oh,—she loved him, she loved him!

He wrote he was obliged to go to San Francisco. It was impossible to find a position in New York during midsummer, and his father had telegraphed him to come home. He would have to go, but he longed to see Jeannette just once before he went. He must see her, if only to say “good-bye.” He was coming back the first of September, and then he would.... But they must talk everything over. Wouldn’t she please let him come?

Jeannette still hesitated. She wanted to see him again; yet she was afraid,—afraid of disappointment, of what her mother and sister might think, of herself and Roy. In the end, with what seemed to her a weakness she despised, she wrote him, and named an afternoon; Although the doctor had said she was to remain in bed for another week, she prevailed upon her mother and sister to move her into the studio, where with pillows about her and a comforter across her knees, and her hair arranged in the pretty fashion Alice sometimes liked to dress it, she received her lover.

It was as unsatisfactory an interview as she had feared. Constraint held them both. Jeannette was intent upon not betraying the delicious madness into which her thoughts of Roy had led her during the empty hours of her long illness, and she sat up stiffly, unbendingly. Roy did not understand. He thought the change in her was due to her illness, but there was something about her that troubled him. They made their promises to one another, they held each other’s hands, they kissed good-bye, but there was nothing fervid about any of it. At the door, however, when he turned, hat in hand, for a final, searching look, she saw a glitter in his eyes, his queer little mouth was straight and drawn harshly, unsmilingly across his teeth. It was that last look of him, that wet gleam in his eyes which took her courage and brought her own tears in a rush. But by then he was gone. The dull boom of the hall-door closing downstairs announced his departure with stern finality.

§ 2

The summer bore on, hot, unalleviated. The apartment smelled of strange odors, was close, airless in spite of open windows. The Najarians, with much banging and clattering, left with their trunks and boxes for several weeks at the seashore, and on the first of the month old Mrs. Porter, who had occupied the first floor since the building was erected thirty years before, moved away. Only the two trained nurses, one flight down, who were rarely at home, remained in the city during the burning weeks of July and August.

With the Sturgises, life became dreary and grew drearier. Miss Loughborough’s school closed, Signor Bellini departed for his beloved Italy, the Wednesday and Saturday pupils became fewer and fewer and by mid-July had evaporated entirely. Mrs. Sturgis, fretting over the trivial expenses each day inevitably brought, wore a worried, harassed air. She found some work to do, copying music, but this had to be given up, as her teeth commenced to give her trouble. How long she was able to disguise her discomfort from her daughters, they never guessed, but her misery eventually was discovered, and she was summarily driven to a dentist. It developed that her teeth were in such a decayed condition they would all have to be pulled, and replaced by an artificial set.

Poor Mrs. Sturgis wept and protested. She objected strenuously to anything so drastic. It wasn’t in the least necessary! She couldn’t possibly afford it! Her daughters urged her and argued with her until they lost their tempers and there was almost a quarrel in the little household. The dentist declined to modify his advice. Pain—cruel, persistent pain, that robbed her of her sleep, and sapped her strength—finally compelled her to give way.

“I’ll do it,—but my girlies haven’t the faintest idea what they are letting me in for! It will be the death of me!” wailed Mrs. Sturgis.

Jeannette, able to sit up now and hobble from one room to another, regarded her mother with frank impatience as she rocked vigorously back and forth, weeping abjectly into a drenched little handkerchief. She felt sorry for her, she would have made any sacrifice to alleviate her pain to make matters easier for her, and yet it was obvious there was no other course for her, and the sooner the teeth were out and a false set in their place, the better it would be for them all. The girl gazed gloomily out of the window.

“And my daughter’s no comfort to me,” continued Mrs. Sturgis, piteously, conscious of Jeannette’s unvoiced criticism. “The child that I’ve raised through sorrow and tribulation, through hunger and self-denial,—the daughter for whom I’ve worked and sacrificed my life....”

Jeannette continued to stare stonily into space, locked her fingers more tightly together, but said nothing.

Eventually there came the terrible day when Mrs. Sturgis and Alice went forth to the dental surgeon, and when the young girl brought her spent and broken mother home in a cab. The four flights of stairs for the exhausted woman were a dreadful ordeal. Jeannette, catching a glimpse of the labored progress, as she gazed over the balustrade from the top landing, forgot her own weakened condition, the doctor’s caution, and hurried to her mother’s assistance. She ran down the stairs and grasped the little woman’s almost fainting figure in her young arms. Together the sisters dragged and pushed her up the remaining steps, but the older girl knew before she reached the top, that she had put too great a strain upon her own partially regained strength.

She paid for the imprudence by another three weeks in bed. It was the longest three weeks of her life. Her mother roamed about from room to room, toothless and inarticulate, unable to eat solid food, waiting for her lacerated gums to heal. She complained and mumbled almost incessantly, harassed by the thought of doctor’s and dentist’s bills which she declared over and over she saw no way of ever paying. Jeannette, chained to her bed, had to listen unhappily. Mrs. Sturgis gave her no respite. She refused to leave the house for fear of meeting a friend in the street who would discover her toothlessness. Alice went to market and ran the errands, while Mrs. Sturgis rocked back and forth, back and forth, beside Jeannette’s bed, picked at her darning, and complained of life. It was not like her mother, thought the daughter wearily; she of indomitable spirit, who had never been afraid of hardships, but rejoiced in overcoming them.

Letters from Roy brought the only alleviating spots in these long, tiring days. He wrote almost every day and there were numerous picture post-cards. His letters were full of assurances and young hopes. Jeannette loved his endearments, his underscored protestations, but the plans which he elaborately unfolded seemed so uncertain, their realization so improbable that they left her cold. She read the scrawled words in the immature script, and tried to conjure up a picture of him penning them. It eluded her. The boy in the Norfolk jacket with the stuck-up hair, blue eyes, and whimsical smile, that had so strangely fired her heart, had already become hazy and remote. Her own weak back and helplessness, her mother’s trembling cheeks and mumbled complaints were harsh realities, very close at hand. The summer sun blazed on unsparingly, and perspiration covered her arms and neck and trickled down between her breasts. Spring and young love, the glittering Avenue, walks and talks and murmured confidences that whipped the blood and caught the breath, were of a far distant yesterday. Was there ever a time when thoughts of this boy had kept her awake at nights, a time when at the memory of his kiss her tears had blinded her? It was some other Jeannette,—not the one who sighed wearily and wished Alice would keep the door shut, and not let in the flies to bother her.

§ 3

Slowly Nature reasserted herself. Strength returned, old hopes revived, youth throbbed again in the veins, life once more took on a pleasing aspect. The late August day, that found Jeannette making a cautious way toward the Park on her first venture from the house, was brilliant with warm but not too hot sunshine, and the foliage of trees and shrubbery in the Park vistas never appeared greener or more inviting.

Mrs. Sturgis’ false teeth had made a great improvement in her appearance, had rounded out her face, given strength to her jaw, and made her seem ten years younger. The little woman was delighted with the effect, and was now evincing a gratified interest in her appearance. Signor Bellini had returned earlier than he expected, had already started his Monday and Thursday classes, while Miss Loughborough’s Concentration School for Young Ladies was about to open its doors, and pupils were flocking back from their vacations. And lastly, and to the girl, most important of all, Roy was returning to New York.

He would arrive in the city in a few days, and she wondered how she would feel toward him when they met. As she sat upon a park bench, enjoying the sun and the toddling children playing in the soft gravel of the pathway near by, she asked herself if she cared. She could not tell. Of far more interest to her was the prospect of work again. She had been stifled all summer by illness and heat, but now she wanted to get back to the business world and win her independence anew. Her ambition was afire; she was all eagerness to have a job once more.... Roy? ... Well, it would be pleasant to have him making love to her again, to watch him tremble at her nearness.

But she found herself thrilling on the afternoon he was to see her. He had telephoned in the morning from the station, and his voice had sounded wonderfully sweet and eager. When his ring at the door announced him, her heart raced madly. Delicious tremors, one after another, coursed through her.

He came hurrying up the stairs and she met him in the studio. Their hands instantly found one another’s, and they stood so a moment, smiling happily and ardently into each other’s eyes; then she drifted into his arms, and it seemed the peace of the world had come.

Ah, she had forgotten how dear he was, how lovable, how sweet! It was good to have him take her to himself that way, and feel his thin arms about her, and have him hold her close against his young hard breast.

Plans—plans,—they were full of them. They were engaged now; Mrs. Sturgis and Alice must be told, the father wired, and Roy must immediately set about finding a job. He had some corking letters, he told her eagerly, and he was on the trail of a splendid position already. Jeannette was going to find work, too; they would both save, buy all the clothes they would need, and be married,—oh, some time in the spring! Roy, holding both her hands, gazed at her with shining eyes, his whole face glowing with excitement.

“Oh, God, Jeannette—oh, God! Just think! You and me! Married!”

It was a wonderful prospect.

§ 4

In less than a week, he had obtained a promising position with the Chandler B. Corey Company, publishers of high-class fiction and the best of standard books. It was a new but flourishing organization with offices on Union Square. In addition to its book business, there were two monthly magazines, The Wheel of Fortune and Corey’s Commentary, and Roy was made part of the staff that secured advertisements for the pages of these periodicals. He was full of enthusiasm for his new work. Mr. Featherstone, the advertising manager, who was also a member of the firm, was the jolliest kind of a man, and the other fellows in the department, Humphrey Stubbs and Walt Chase, were “awfully nice” chaps. He was to receive from the start, twenty dollars a week, and Mr. Featherstone promised him a raise of five dollars at the end of three months, if he made good. The gods were with them. Jeannette and he could be married early in the spring.

The girl listened and pretended to rejoice, but her heart was sick within her. Roy, getting twenty dollars a week!—back in a job!—independent and secure once more!—a bright future and rapid advancement ahead of him! She was bitterly envious. She longed for the old life of business hours, of office excitement, for her neatly managed if frugal lunches, for the early hours in the mornings and the tired hours at night, for the heart-warming touch of the firm, plump little manila envelope on Saturday mornings, and, above all, she longed for the satisfaction of being a wage-earner again, of being financially her own mistress, and being able to contribute something toward the household bills each week.

The next day she started out to find work. She knew it would be a humiliating business, but she found it worse than she feared. The advertisements for stenographers in the newspapers which she answered, all turned out to be disappointing. The most she was offered was ten dollars a week, and in the majority of cases only six or eight. She had made up her mind to accept nothing less than what she had earned before. She would walk out of an office into the glaring street with the prick of tears smarting her eyes, with lips that trembled, but she would vigorously shake her head, and renew her determination.

She went to interview Miss Ingram of the Gerard Commercial School, but Miss Ingram had no vacant positions on her list.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the little teacher said with a forlorn air; “I’ve got three girls now just waiting for something to turn up, but all they want downtown are boys—boys—boys!”

Twice Jeannette had the unpleasant experience of having men to whom she applied for work lay their hands on her. One slipped his arm about her, and tried to kiss her, pressing a bushy wet mustache against her face; the other placed his fat fingers caressingly over hers and, leering at her, promised he would find her a good job, if she’d come back later in the day. She was equal to these occasions but there was always a sickening reaction that left her weak and trembling with a salt taste in her mouth. She said nothing about them at home.

Her mother and Alice, even Roy, had urged her not to go to work again. Mrs. Sturgis reiterated her original objection; Alice thought it was not necessary, that Janny had better take things easy and devote her time to wedding preparations. Roy did not like the idea, he frankly admitted, of her associating so intimately with a lot of men in an office, and, besides, it distracted her, made her nervous.

“In three months, sweetheart, I’ll be getting twenty-five dollars a week and we can get married. A hundred a month is enough for a while. You ought to run the table on ten dollars a week,—your mother does that for the three of you!—and out of the remaining sixty, we surely will have enough for rent, and a lot left over for clothes and theatres.”

“Oh, yes,” Jeannette sighed wearily, “it’s plenty,—only I want—I want to earn some money myself. I need clothes, and I ought to have everything for a year, at least!”

September passed, and October came with a tingle of autumn, and an early touch of yellow, drifting leaves. Jeannette missed the chance of an excellent position in the manager’s office of a large suit and cloak manufacturer by no more than a minute or two. She saw the other applicant enter the office just ahead of her, and was presently told the place was filled. The girl who had preceded her was Miss Flannigan!

There was another position in a lawyer’s office for which she eagerly applied. She heard the salary was twenty-five dollars a week, but when she was interviewed, and it was discovered she had no knowledge of legal phraseology, she was rejected.

Desperate and discouraged, she was obliged to listen in the evenings to Roy’s glowing praise of his new associates, to detailed accounts of small happenings in the office, and gossip between desks. She learned all about Mr. Featherstone, his devoted and adoring wife, his small, crippled son, his own good nature, and hearty joviality. She heard a great deal about Humphrey Stubbs and Walt Chase. Stubbs, she gathered, was already Roy’s enemy. He had made several efforts to discredit the newcomer, and was on the lookout for things about which to criticize him to his chief. Walt Chase, on the contrary, was amiable and inclined to be very friendly. Walt had been married less than a year, lived in Hackensack, and his wife had just had a baby.

Jeannette listened enviously, with despair in her heart, when she heard about Miss Anastasia Reubens, the editor of The Wheel of Fortune. That Miss Reubens was forty-five and had spent all the working years of her life on the editorial staff of one magazine or another made little difference to Jeannette. She hated to inquire about her, but her curiosity was too great.

“What do you suppose she gets?” she asked Roy with a casual air.

“Oh, I don’t know; perhaps fifty or sixty a week. I’m sure I haven’t an idea. None of the folks down there get high salaries; everyone is underpaid. Mr. Corey hasn’t more than got the business started. He only began it five years ago. He tells us, we’ve got to wait with him, until the money begins to come in, and then we’ll all share in the profits.”

“Fifty or sixty a week?” sniffed Jeannette. “Did she tell you she got that? ... She’s lucky, if she gets twenty-five!”

Roy shrugged his shoulders. He had an irritating way of avoiding arguments, Jeannette noticed, by lapsing silent. She considered the matter for a moment further, but decided it was not worth pressing.

“What kind of a man is Mr. Corey?” she asked.

“Oh, Corey? Corey’s a peach. He’s a dynamo of energy, and has all sorts of enthusiasm. He’s got the most magnetic personality I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s going to make a whale of a big business out of that concern. Every Wednesday we all lunch together,—that is, the men in the editorial and book departments,—and we go to the Brevoort; we’ve got a private room down there, and Mr. Corey always comes and talks to us about the business and we try to offer suggestions that will help each other. We call it ‘The Get Together Club.’ It’s great.”

Jeannette studied her lover’s face and for a moment felt actual dislike for him. What did he know? Why should he be so fortunate? Why should everything go so smoothly for him? Why shouldn’t she have a chance like that?

“Mr. Featherstone may send me to Boston Friday to see the Advertising Manager of Jordan & Marsh about some copy. He said something about it last night. I’d hate to go, but, gee! it would be a great trip!”

Jeannette rose to her feet abruptly and lowered a hissing gas-jet. Oh, she was unreasonable, silly, ungenerous! But she couldn’t listen any longer. It made her sick.

§ 5

Mr. Abrahms, of Abrahms & Frank,—fur dealers and repairers of fur garments,—would pay twelve dollars a week for a first-class “stenog,” who “vood vork from eight till sigs.” He was very anxious that Jeannette should accept his offer.

“I need a goil chust lige you, who c’n tage letters vot I digtate an’ put ’em into nice English, and be polide to der customers vot come in ven I am busy,” he explained.

It was a cheap little establishment, crowded into the first floor and basement of an old private dwelling, now devoted to similar small enterprises. A dressmaker occupied the second floor, an electrician the next, and a sign-painter the last and topmost. It was far from being the kind of employment Jeannette wanted, but it was the best that had been offered, and she promised to report on Monday.

She went dismally home on the “L,” deriving a bitter satisfaction in picturing to herself what her days would be like, cooped up in an ill-ventilated back office with the swarthy, none-too-clean Mr. Abrahms, interviewing the none-too-clean customers who would be likely to patronize such a place. Still it was a job and she was a wage-earner again. There would be some comfort in announcing the news to Roy and to her mother and sister.

She found a message from Roy when she reached home. It had been brought by the clerk in Bannerman’s Drug Store. He had said, Alice repeated for the hundredth time, that Mr. Beardsley had ’phoned and asked him to tell Miss Jeannette Sturgis to come down at once to his office; he had said it was important. Alice didn’t know anything more than that; there wasn’t any use asking her questions; the clerk had just said that, and that was all.

“Perhaps he’s got a job for me!” Jeannette exclaimed with a wild hope. “He knows how badly I want one!”

“I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea.” Her sister turned back to the soapy water in the wash-tub where she was carefully washing some of her mother’s jabots.

“Well, I’ll fly.”

Jeannette hurried to her room, and jerked the tissue paper out of her best shirtwaist. Her fingers trembled as she re-dressed herself; the tiny loops that connected with small pearl buttons on her cuffs eluded her again and again until she was almost ready to cry with fury. She felt sure that Roy had a job for her; he would have telephoned for no other reason. In thirty minutes she was aboard the “L” again, rushing downtown.

As she crossed Union Square the gold sign of the Chandler B. Corey Company spreading itself imposingly across the façade of an ancient office building made her heart beat faster, and her rapid, breathless walk doubled with her excitement into almost a skip as she hurried along. Oh, there was good news awaiting her! She felt it!

The wheezy elevator bumped and rumbled as it leisurely ascended. At the fourth floor she stepped out into a reception room whose walls were covered with large framed drawings and paintings. There were some magazines arranged on a center table. The place smelt of ink and wet paste. A smiling girl rose from a desk and came toward her.

“I’ll see if he’s in,” she said in reply to Jeannette’s query and disappeared.

Upon an upholstered wicker seat in one corner of the room an odd-looking woman wearing a huge cart-wheel hat was talking animatedly to another who listened with a twisted, sour smile. They were discussing photographs, and the woman in the cart-wheel hat was handing them out one by one from a great pile in her lap. Jeannette was forced to listen.

“This one is of some monks in a village monastery in Korea, and this shows some of the Buddhist prayers for sale in a Japanese shop,—did you ever see such a number?—and here is a group of our Bible students at Tientsin,—could you ask for more intelligent faces? ... Wonderful work.... these men are sacrificing their lives ... twelve thousand dollars....” The words trailed off into an impressive whisper.

Down in the Square the trees were a mass of lovely golden brown and golden yellow shades. Tiffany’s windows across the way sparkled with dull silver.

Roy’s quick step sounded behind her, and Jeannette turned to meet his grinning, eager face, his smile stretched to its tightest across his small and even white teeth.

“Gee, I’m glad you’ve come, Janny!” he exclaimed boyishly. “Say, you look dandy!—you look out-of-sight!” He eyed her delightedly. The woman with the sour, twisted smile glanced toward them casually. Jeannette was all cool dignity.

“What was it, Roy? ... Why did you send for me?”

He continued to smile at her, but at last her serious, expectant look sobered him.

“I think I’ve got a job for you!” he said quickly, dropping his voice. “I only heard about it this morning. I couldn’t telephone until I went out to lunch. One of our regular stenographers is sick; she’s very sick and is not coming back. Mr. Kipps, the business manager, was explaining why they were short-handed upstairs and I was right there, so of course I heard about it. I spoke to Mr. Featherstone about you, and he sent me to Kipps, and Kipps told me to tell you to come down, so he could talk to you. I told him what a wizard you were, and he seemed awfully interested. I didn’t lose a minute; I telephoned as soon as I went out to lunch. I had a deuce of a time making that drug clerk understand.... Gee, you look dandy! ... Gee, you look swell! ... Gee, I love you!”

He piloted her a few minutes later into the inner offices. Jeannette gained a confused impression of crowded desks and clerks, the iron grilling of a cashier’s cage, an open safe, a litter of paper, wire baskets of letters, and stacks of bills. Before she knew it, she found herself confronting Mr. Kipps, and Roy had abandoned her. She was aware of a nervous, fidgety personality, with a thin, hawklike face and long, thin fingers. He had unkempt hair and mustache, and wore round, black tortoise-shell glasses through which he darted quick little glances of appraisement at the girl who had seated herself at his invitation beside his desk.

He fitted his finger-tips neatly together as he questioned her, lolled back in his swivel armchair, and swung himself slowly from side to side, kicking the desk gently with his feet. He asked her to spell “privilege” and “acknowledgment,” and to tell him how many degrees there were in a circle. He nodded with her replies.

He would give her a trial; she could report in the morning. He dismissed her with no mention of what salary she would receive.

But Jeannette did not care. She was delighted and in high spirits. This was just the kind of a job she wanted, just the sort of an atmosphere she longed for; she felt certain that, whatever they paid her at first, she would soon make them give her what she was worth.

When Roy arrived that evening there was great hilarity in the Sturgis household. He had never seen Jeannette in such wild spirits, or found her so affectionate with him. The coldness he sometimes met in her, the reserve, the unyieldingness, were all absent now. He pulled the shabby davenport up before the fire, and they sat holding hands, watching the dying fire flicker and flicker and finally flicker out, and when the light was gone she lay close against him, his arms about her, and every now and then, as he bent his head over her, she raised hers to his, and their lips met.

§ 6

Her desk, with those of the five other stenographers employed by the publishing company, was located on the floor above the editorial offices. Here were also the circulation and mail order departments. Light entered from three broad front windows but it was far from sufficient and thirty electric bulbs under green tin cones suspended by long wire cords burned throughout the day over the rows of desks and tables that filled the congested loft. At these were some hundred girls and women, and half a dozen men. In the rear, where the daylight failed almost completely to penetrate, the cones of electric radiance flooded the dark recesses brilliantly. Old Hodgson, who was in charge of the outgoing mail, there had his domain, and it was in this quarter that the lumbering freight elevator occasionally made its appearance with a bang and crash of opening iron doors. Toward the front, near the windows, and separated from the rest by low railings, were located the desks of Miss Holland and Mr. Max Oppenheim. The former was a tall, thin-faced woman with iron-gray hair and a distinguished voice and manner. Just what her duties were Jeannette could not guess. She had her own stenographer and was forever dictating, or going downstairs with sheaves of letters in her hands for conferences with Mr. Kipps. Oppenheim was the Circulation Manager. He was a Jew, intelligent and shrewd, with a pallor so pronounced it seemed unhealthy, further emphasized by a thick mop of coal-black glistening hair that swept straight back without a parting from his smooth white forehead. Jeannette thought she recognized in him a type to be avoided; but she never saw anything either in his manner toward her or the other girls at which to take exception.

There was one other individual in the room who had a department to herself. This was a chubby, bespectacled lady with an unpronounceable German name who presided over a huddle of desks and conducted the mail order department. No one ever seemed to have anything to say to her, nor did she in her turn appear to have anything to say to anyone. She plodded on with her work, unmolested, lost sight of. Sometimes Jeannette suspected that Mr. Corey and Mr. Kipps and the other men downstairs had forgotten the woman’s existence.

The stenographers with whom she was immediately and intimately thrown were distinctly of a better class than the girls who had been her associates in the Soulé Publishing Company. Miss Foster was red-headed and given to shouts of infectious mirth, Miss Lopez was Spanish, pretty and charming, Miss Bixby was a trifle hoidenish but good-natured, and Miss Pratt was frankly an old maid for whom life had been obviously a hard and devastating struggle; there remained Miss La Farge, who, Jeannette suspected, was not of the world of decent women; her be-ribboned lingerie was clearly discernible through her sheer and transparent shirtwaists, and she was given to rouge, lavish powdering, and strong scent.

The first day in her new position was as difficult as Jeannette anticipated. She knew she gave the impression of being cold and condescending, but her shyness would not permit her to unbend. The girls were politely distant with her at first, but Jeannette was fully aware that each and every one of them was alive to her presence, and everything they did and said was for her benefit.

She made an early friend of Miss Holland. The tall woman stopped at her desk in passing, smiled pleasantly at her and asked if everything was going all right. Something of quality, of good breeding in the older woman’s face brought the girl to her feet, and it was this trifling act of courtesy that won Miss Holland’s approval and favor, which Jeannette never was to lose.

There were plenty of girls scattered among the tables where the business of folding circulars, addressing envelopes, and writing cards went on, who were of the high-heeled, pompadoured, sallow-skinned variety with which Jeannette was already familiar, but these persons came and went with the work; few of them were regular employees.

When a stenographer was needed in the editorial department a buzzer sounded upstairs and the girl next in order answered the summons. Miss Foster usually took Mr. Corey’s dictation and also that of his secretary, Mr. Smith, but the other girls went from Mr. Featherstone to Mr. Kipps to Miss Reubens and to the rest as they were required.

Mr. Kipps sent especially for Jeannette on her first morning. She was nervous and her pencil trembled a little as she scribbled down her notes. She found his dictation extremely difficult to take; he hesitated, paused a long time to think of the word he wanted, corrected himself, asked her to repeat what he had said, or to scratch out what she had written and to go back and read her notes to a point where he could recommence. But he seemed pleased when she brought him the finished letters.

“Very good, Miss Sturgis,—very good indeed,” he said without enthusiasm, tapping his pursed lips with the tip of his penholder as he scanned her work.

She was jubilant. She looked for Roy; she was eager to tell him what Mr. Kipps had said. But he was not at his desk as she passed through the advertising department, nor was he waiting for her—as she hoped—when five o’clock came and she started home.

Well, she was satisfied,—she had gotten just what she wanted,—she would soon make herself indispensable.... Mr. Kipps was really a lovely man, although one would never suspect it from his nervous manner. She felt a sudden assurance she was going to be very happy.

Roy found her again in her sweetest, kindest mood that evening. They began at once to discuss everyone in the entire organization of the company from the President, himself, down to Bertram, the little Jew office boy, who was inclined to be fresh. The publishing house had suddenly become their entire world and everyone in it was either friend or foe.

“I hope I make good,” sighed Jeannette.

“Make good?” repeated her lover indignantly. “Of course, you’ll make good. Don’t I know how good you are? Why, say, Janny dear, you’ve got that bunch of girls skinned a mile!”

It was soon evident to Jeannette that Roy was right. The next day she made a point of glancing at some of Miss Foster’s and Miss Lopez’s letters; she noted two errors in the former’s, and the latter’s were rubbed and full of erasures; the letters, themselves, were poorly spaced and the sheets in several instances were far from being clean. She was genuinely shocked at such slovenliness. They would not have tolerated it at the school for a minute! The girls who had been with her under Beardsley had done better work than that!.... She paused over the thought and smiled. It was funny now to think of dear old Roy as the Mr. Beardsley who had once filled her with such awe and in fear of whose displeasure she had actually trembled.

§ 7

Her satisfaction with her new position found utter completeness when on her first Saturday morning her pay envelope reached her, and she discovered she was to receive fifteen dollars a week. It was the last drop in her felicity. She flung herself into her work with all the eagerness of an intense young nature. In turn she took dictation from Mr. Featherstone, Miss Reubens, Mr. Olmstead, the auditor, and young Mr. Cavendish, who edited Corey’s Commentary. Everyone seemed to like her. Miss Reubens, having tried the new stenographer, thereafter invariably asked for her, and while this was gratifying in its way, Jeannette would have willingly foregone the distinction. Miss Reubens was not a pleasing personality for whom to work; she referred to Jeannette as “the new girl,” treated her like a machine, and kept her sitting idly beside her desk while she sorted papers or carried on long conversations at the telephone. She was a high-strung, perpetually agitated person, given to complaining a great deal, undoubtedly overworked, but finding consolation in pitying herself and in bemoaning her hard lot. Jeannette recognized in her the lady with the twisted, sour mouth who had been inspecting photographs the day she first came to the office.

Mr. Olmstead, the auditor, was a tiresome old man, who teetered on his toes when he talked and tapped his thumb-nail with the rim of his eye-glasses to emphasize his words. He took a tedious time over his dictation, and Jeannette had to shut her lips tightly to keep from prompting him.

Mr. Cavendish, on the other hand, was charming. He was about thirty-three or-four, Jeannette judged, handsome, with thick, very dark red hair, and a thick, dark red mustache. He was always very courteous, and had an ever-ready stock of pleasantries. She was aware that he admired her, and she could not help feeling self-conscious in his company. They joked together mildly and their eyes frequently held one another’s in amused glances. Of all the people in the office she liked best to take dictation from him; he never repeated himself, his sentences were neatly phrased and to the point, and his choice of words, she considered, beautiful. That he was unmarried did not detract from her interest in him. She read some of the recent back numbers of Corey’s Commentary and particularly the editorials, and told Roy she admired them enormously.

She was far happier in the environment of the editorial rooms than upstairs where she worked with the other stenographers in the midst of the bustle, racket and confusion of the circulation and mail order departments. She soon discovered she had little in common with Miss Foster or Miss Bixby; Miss Lopez was a pretty nonentity; Miss Pratt, an elderly incompetent, and Miss La Farge, a vulgar-lipped grisette. The girls realized she looked down on them and clannishly hung together, to talk about her among themselves. They were not openly rude, but Jeannette was aware she was not popular with them.

Miss Holland alone on the first floor attracted her. They smiled at one another whenever their eyes met, and Jeannette enjoyed the feeling that this faded, kindly gentlewoman recognized in her a girl of her own class.

§ 8

There were a dozen other personalities in the company that the new stenographer learned to know and with whom she came more or less into contact. Important among these was Mr. Corey’s secretary, Mr. Smith, whom nobody liked. He was suspected of being a tale-bearer, an informant who tattled inconsequences to his chief. He was obviously a toady, and treated everyone in the office, not a member of the firm, with an air of great condescension. Mrs. Charlotte Inness of the book department was a regal, gray-haired personage, with many floating draperies that were ever trailing magnificently behind her as she came and went. Miss Travers, who was cooped up all day behind the wire grilling of the Cashier’s cage, was a waspish, merry individual, and although sometimes common, even vulgar, was both friendly and amusing. Francis Holme and Van Alstyne spent most of their time on the road visiting book dealers. Van Alstyne was English and inclined to be patronizing, but Holme was large-toothed, large-mouthed and big-eared, bluff and frank, noisy and good-hearted. And there was also Mr. Cavendish’s assistant, Horatio Stephens, a tall, rangy young man, with rather a dreamy, detached air, with whom Roy shared a room at his boarding-house. Jeannette found him vaguely repellent; there was something about his long skinny hands and drooping eyelids that made her creepy. And then there was Mr. Corey himself.

Chandler B. Corey was, as Roy had described him, a man of vivid personality. Although not yet in his fifties, he had a full head of silky white hair. In sharp contrast to this were his black bushy eyebrows and his black mustache which curled gracefully at the ends and which he had a habit of pulling whenever he was thinking hard. His skin was pink and clear as a boy’s, but there was nothing effeminate in his face with its heavy square jaw. There was a dynamic quality about him that communicated itself to everyone who came in contact with him, and yet with all his energy and fire, Jeannette noted there was an extraordinary gentleness about him, somewhat suggesting sadness.

On a day toward the end of her third week, she took a long and important letter from him. Miss Foster was struggling with a pile of other work he had already given her, and Mr. Smith sent Bertram upstairs with a request for Miss Sturgis to come down.

She had never been in Mr. Corey’s office before. At once she was struck with its quality. Compared with the noisy ruggedness and bare floors outside, it was quiet, luxurious. Sectional bookcases, filled to overflowing, and many autographed framed photographs lined walls that were covered with burlap. There were one or two large leather armchairs and in the center a great flat-topped desk heaped with manuscripts and stacks of clipped papers. A film of dust lay over many of these, and the scent of cigar smoke was in the air. Mr. Corey’s silvery head beyond the desk appeared as a startling blot of white against the background of warm brown.

She was surprised to discover how tersely he dictated. There was nothing of a literary quality about his sentences, nothing savoring of the polish of Mr. Cavendish. He was all business and dispatch. She felt oddly sorry for him; more than once during the brief quarter of an hour that she was with him a great sympathy for him came over her. He seemed weighed down with responsibilities. A paper mill was pressing him for money; no funds would be available for another three months; his letter offered them his note for ninety days. While he dictated, the telephone interrupted him; something had gone wrong with the linotype machines, and the delay would result in The Wheel of Fortune being two or three days late on the news-stands. In the midst of this conversation Mr. Featherstone came in to report that Shreve & Baker had cancelled their advertisement and had definitely refused to renew it. An army of annoyances pressed around on every side.

She told Roy about it when he came to see her that night.

“Oh, C. B.’s a wonder,” he agreed; “he carries that whole concern on his shoulders, and you can rest assured there’s nothing goes on down there that he doesn’t know. They all depend on him.”

“He seems so over-burdened, and so—so harassed,” Jeannette said.

“I guess he’s all of that. You know he’s had an awful hard time getting a start; the business is just about able to stand on its own feet now.”

“I don’t think Mr. Smith is much help to him. He could save him a whole lot if he would.”

“Oh, that fish! He’s no good. He told C. B. a most outrageous lie about Mr. Featherstone; there was an awful row.”

“Then why doesn’t Mr. Featherstone have him discharged?”

“Nobody’s got anything to say down there except Mr. Corey. He owns fifty-one per cent of the stock, I understand, and if he likes Smith, Smith is going to stay.”

“I can’t see how Mr. Corey can put up with him.”

“How did C. B. like your work?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Smith took it when I brought it downstairs, and carried it in to him. I didn’t hear a word; but he didn’t send it back to me for anything.”

“He was pleased all right. You’ve made a hit with everyone. They’re all crazy about you; Miss Reubens always wants you; and Cavendish, I notice, seems to take a special interest in his dictation now.”

The last was said with an amused scrutiny of her face.

“Oh, don’t be silly, Roy!”

“I’m not,” he declared sensibly. “I don’t care if he admires you. Men are always going to do that. Holme asked me the other day who the new queen was, and I was mighty proud to tell him you were my fiancée. I guess I appreciate the fact that the smartest, loveliest girl in the world is going to be my wife!”

“Oh,—don’t!” Jeannette repeated. There was trouble in her face.

§ 9

Her days were packed full of interest now. She enjoyed every moment of the time spent within the shabby portals of the publishing house. The rest of the twenty-four hours were given to happy anticipation of new experiences awaiting her, or in pleasant retrospect of happenings that marked her advancement. For it was clear to her she was progressing, daily tightening her hold upon her job, making the “big” people like her, bringing herself nearer and nearer the goal she some day eagerly hoped to reach: of being indispensable to these delightful, new employers. To what end this tended, how far it would carry her, under what circumstances she would achieve final success she could not surmise. She was conscious these days only of an intense satisfaction, a delight in knowing she was steadily, though blindly, attaining her ambition.

Often she wished during these early weeks she had a dozen pairs of hands that she might take everyone’s dictation and type all the letters that left the office. She became interested in the subject and purpose of these letters. Cavendish wrote an urgent note to a Mr. David Russell Purington, who was a regular contributor to Corey’s Commentary from Washington, telling him how extremely important it was, in connection with a certain article shortly to appear in the magazine, for him to obtain an exclusive interview on the subject with the Japanese plenipotentiary at that time visiting the capital. Miss Reubens fretted and murmured complainingly as she worded a communication to Lester Short, the author, explaining that it was impossible for The Wheel of Fortune to pay the price he asked for his story, The Broken Jade. Mr. Kipps, through her, informed the Typographical Union, Number 63, that under no conditions would the Chandler B. Corey Company reëmploy Timothy Conboy and that if the union persisted, the Publishing Company was prepared to declare for an open shop. Mrs. Inness confided to her hand an enthusiastic memorandum to Mr. Corey urging him to accept and publish at once a novel called The Honorable Estate by a new writer, Homer Deering, which she declared was of the most sensational nature.

But after typing these letters and memorandums Jeannette heard nothing more of them. She wanted to know whether or not Mr. David Russell Purington succeeded in obtaining the much desired interview, what Lester Short decided to do about the seventy-five dollars Miss Reubens offered, how the Typographical Union, Number 63, replied to Mr. Kipps’ ultimatum, and if Mr. Corey accepted Homer Deering’s significant manuscript. Her curiosity was seldom gratified; she hardly ever saw the replies to the letters she had typed with such interest. Miss Foster, Miss Lopez, Miss Pratt, Miss Bixby or Miss La Farge continued the correspondence. Often she would see a letter unwinding itself from a neighboring machine at the top of which she would recognize a familiar name, but she had no time to read further, and there was a certain restraint observed among the girls about overlooking one another’s work. Jeannette realized she was merely a small cog in a machine and that her prejudices, enthusiasms, her interest and opinion were of small consequence to anyone.

She rose early in the morning, sometimes at five, and her mother would hear her thumping and pounding with an iron in the kitchen as she pressed a shirtwaist to wear fresh to the office, or clitter-clattering in the bathroom as she polished her shoes or washed stockings. Her costume was invariably neat and smart, but she dressed soberly, with knowing effectiveness for her working day. Her mother, yawning sleepily or frowning in mild distress, would find her getting her own breakfast at seven.

“Why, dearie,” she would plaintively remonstrate, “whatever do you want to bother with the stove for? I’m going to get your breakfast; you leave that to me.... I don’t see,” she might add querulously, “why you have to get up at such unearthly hours.”

Alice would shortly make her appearance, and with wrappers trailing, slippers clapping and shuffling about the kitchen, her mother and sister would complete the simple preparations for her morning meal, and set about getting their own. About the time they had borne in the smoking granite coffee-pot again to the dining-room, and had hunched up their chairs to the table, Jeannette would be ready to leave the house. When she came to kiss them good-bye, she would always find them there, her mother’s cheek soft and warm, Alice’s firm, hard face, cool and smelling faintly of soap. She would seem so vigorously alive as she left them, so confident and capable. There was always a tremendous satisfaction in feeling well-dressed, well-prepared and early-started for her day’s work. As she left the house, and filled her lungs with the first breath of sharp morning air, there would come a tug of excitement at the prospect of the hours ahead. She loved the trip downtown on the bumping, whirring elevated; she loved the close contact with fellow-passengers, wage-earners like herself; she loved the brisk walk along Seventeenth Street and across the leaf-strewn square, where she faced the tide of clerks and office workers that poured steadily out of the Ghetto and lower East Side, and set itself toward the great tall buildings of lower Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and she loved the first glimpse of the gold sign of the Chandler B. Corey Company, with the feeling that she belonged there and was one of its employees.

She would be at her desk half to three-quarters of an hour ahead of the other girls. There would usually be work left over from the previous day. She liked settling herself for the busy hours to come when no one was around and she could do so with comfort.

She would hardly be conscious of the other girls’ arrival, and would often greet them with a smiling good-morning, or answer their questions with no recollection afterwards of having done so.

The whirlwind of office demands and the tide of work would soon be about her. Miss Reubens wanted her, Mr. Kipps rang for a stenographer, Mr. Featherstone had an important letter to get off before he went out. Would Miss Sturgis look up that letter to the Glenarsdale Agency? Would Miss Sturgis come down when she was free? Mr. Cavendish had an article he wanted copied as soon as possible. Miss Bixby was busy, Miss Foster was busy, Miss Lopez, Miss Pratt, Miss La Farge were busy; Miss Sturgis was busiest of all. She thrilled to the rush and fury of her days. There was never a let-up, never a lull; there was always more and more work piling up.

At noon, at twelve-thirty, at one,—whenever she was free for a moment about that time,—she would slip out for her lunch. She had learned she must eat,—eat something, no matter how little, in the middle of the day. She still patronized the soda and candy counter in the big rotunda of Siegel-Cooper’s mammoth department store for her china cup of coffee and two saltine crackers. Sometimes she spent another nickel for a bag of peanut brittle. Somewhere she had read that the sugar in the candy and the starch in the peanuts contained a high percentage of nutritious value. She nibbled out of the bag on her way back to the office.

She would be gone hardly more than half the hour she was allowed for luncheon. Between one and three in the afternoon was the time she was least interrupted, and in this interval her fingers flew, and letter after letter,—slipped beneath its properly addressed envelope,—would steadily augment the pile in the wire basket that stood beside her machine. She rejoiced when it grew so tall, the stack was in danger of falling out.

In the late afternoon came the rush and the most exacting demands. Miss Reubens had a letter that must go off that night without fail; Mr. Featherstone had just returned from a conference with a big advertiser and wanted a record of the agreement typed at once; Mr. Kipps had a communication to be instantly dispatched; Mr. Corey needed a stenographer. The girls were all busy; they had too much to do already; they could not finish half the letters that had been given them. Well, how about Miss Sturgis? Could Miss Sturgis manage to get out just one more? It was so important. Yes, Miss Sturgis could,—of course she could; it might be late, but if the writer would remain to sign it, she’d manage to finish it somehow.

“You’re a fool,” Miss Bixby said to her one day sourly. “Nobody’s going to thank you for it; you don’t get paid a cent more; I don’t see why you want to make a beast-of-burden out of yourself. They just use you like a sponge in this office; squeeze every ounce of strength out of you, and then throw you away. Look at Linda Harris!”

Linda Harris was the girl who had sickened, and whose place Jeannette now filled.

Perhaps Miss Bixby was right, Jeannette would say to herself, riding home after six and sometimes after seven o’clock on the lurching train, tired to the point where her muscles ached and her sight was blurred. But there was something in her that rose vigorously to this battle of work, that made her reach down and ever deeper down inside herself for new strength and new capacity.

§ 10

Wearily, her hand dragging on the stair rail, she would pull herself step by step up the long flights to the top floor. Tired though she might be, her mind would still be buzzing with the events of the day: Mr. Cavendish’s letter to Senator Slocum,—had she remembered the enclosures? Mr. Kipps had been short with her, or so he had seemed; perhaps he had been only vexed at the end of a long day of worry. Mr. Corey’s smile at a comment she had ventured was consoling. Then there was that friction between Miss Reubens and Mrs. Inness; they had had some sharp words; she wondered which one of them eventually would triumph. Mrs. Inness, of course.... And little Miss Maria Lopez had confided to her in the wash-room she was going to be married!

“Hello, dearie! ... Home again?” Jeannette’s mother would call to her cheerfully as she pushed open the door. Alice would turn her head with a “’Lo, Sis”; she would kiss them dutifully, perfunctorily. The kitchen would be hot and steamy; the smell of food would make her feel giddy, perhaps faint. She would be ravenously hungry. She would go to her dark little bedroom, light the gas, remove her hat, blouse, and skirt and stretch herself gratefully on her bed.... Would Mrs. Inness go to Mr. Corey about her difference with Miss Reubens? ... Miss Holland had had a conference with Mr. Kipps all afternoon; what could it be about? ... Would Bertram be discharged for losing that manuscript? ... Mr. Van Alstyne had certainly been unnecessarily curt; she cordially disliked him.... And Mr. Smith had most assuredly not given her Mr. Corey’s message; why, she remembered distinctly....

“Dinner, dearie.” She would drag herself to her feet, rub her face briskly with a wet wash-rag, and in her wrapper join her mother and sister at table.

“Well, tell us how everything went to-day,” Mrs. Sturgis would say, busy with plates and serving spoon.

“Oh,—’bout the same as usual,” Jeannette would sigh. “Bertram, the office boy, lost a manuscript to-day. It was terribly important. We were awfully busy upstairs, and Mrs. Inness sent the book out to be typed, and he left the package somewheres,—on the street car, he thinks. Mr. Kipps will probably fire him; he deserves it; he’s awfully fresh.”

“You don’t say,” Mrs. Sturgis would murmur abstractedly. “Drink your tea, dearie, before it gets cold.”

Jeannette dutifully sipping the hot brew would consider how to tell them of the trouble between Mrs. Inness and Miss Reubens.

“Miss Reubens,—you know, Mother,—is the editor of The Wheel of Fortune, and Mrs. Charlotte Inness runs our book department. They dislike each other cordially and I just know some day there’s going to be a dreadful row——”

“Alice, dearie,—get Mother another tea-cup,” Mrs. Sturgis might interrupt, her eye on her older daughter’s face to show she was attending. “And while you’re up, you might glance in the oven.... Yes, dearie?” she would say encouragingly to Jeannette.

The girl would recommence her story, but she could see it was impossible to arouse their interest. Their attention wandered; they knew none of the people in the office; it was no concern of theirs what happened to them.

“Kratzmer had the effrontery to charge me thirty cents for a can of peaches to-day,” Mrs. Sturgis would remark. “I just told him they were selling for twenty-five on the next block and I wouldn’t pay it, and he said to me I could take my trade anywhere I chose, and I told him that that was no way to conduct his business, and he as much as told me that it was his business and he intended to run it the way he liked! I wouldn’t stand for such impudence, and I just gave him a piece of my mind.” An indignant finger tossing an imaginary ruffle at her throat suggested what had been the little woman’s agitated manner.

“Kratzmer’s awfully obliging,” Alice commented mildly.

“Well, perhaps,—but the idea!”

“Mr. Corey was unusually nice to me to-day,” Jeannette remarked.

Her mother would smile and nod encouragingly, but her eyes would be inspecting her daughters’ plates, considering another helping or whether it was time for dessert.

“I couldn’t match my braid,” Alice would murmur in a disconsolate tone. “I went to the Woman’s Bazaar and to Miss Blake’s and they had nothing like it. I suppose I’ll have to go downtown to Macy’s. Do you remember, Mother, where you got the first piece?”

“No, I don’t, dearie,” her mother would reply slowly. “Perhaps it was O’Neill & Adams.... How much do you need?”

“About three yards. I could manage with two. Do you suppose you’d have time to-morrow, Janny, to try at Macy’s?”

“Maybe; I can’t promise. You have no idea how rushed we are sometimes.”

“You know I’ve a good mind to try Meyer’s place over on Amsterdam; it always seems so clean. Kratzmer’s getting too independent.”

“Kratzmer knows us, Mama, and sometimes it’s awfully convenient to charge.”

“I know. That’s perfectly true. But the idea of his talking to me that way!”

“They might have it at Siegel-Cooper’s. You could ask there to-morrow. It would only take you five minutes. I hate to go all the way downtown, and there’s the carfare.”

“I’ve traded with Kratzmer ever since he moved into the block. I guess he forgets I’ve been a resident in this neighborhood for nearly thirteen years. He shouldn’t treat me like a casual customer; it’s not right and proper.”

“It would be the greatest help if I could get it to-morrow. I’m absolutely at a standstill on that dress until I have it. Siegel’s sure to keep a big stock. I’ll give you a sample.”

“I’ve always liked the look of things at Meyer’s. All the Jewesses go there and they always know where to get the best things to eat,—but I suppose he is more expensive.”

“It oughtn’t to cost more than twenty cents a yard. Do you remember what you paid for it, Mama?”

“Dearie,—it’s so long ago; I’m sorry.... I’d rather hate to break with Kratzmer after all these years. You can’t help but make friends with the trades-people. Do you think Meyer’s would really be more high-priced, Janny?”

Jeannette would shrug her shoulders and carefully fold her napkin. They were dears,—she loved them best of all the world,—but they seemed so small and petty with their trifling concerns: matching braids and disagreeing with trades-people.

The dinner dishes would be cleared away. Jeannette would brush the cloth, put away the salt and pepper shakers, the napkins, and unused cutlery; then she would carefully fold the tablecloth in its original creases, replace it with the square of chenille curtaining, and climb on a chair to fit the brass hook of the drop-light over the gas-jet above.

Roy would arrive at eight,—he was always there promptly,—and she would have a bare twenty minutes to get ready. She would hear her mother and sister scraping and rattling in the kitchen as she dressed, water hissing into the sink, the bang of the tin dishpan, their voices murmuring.

She would be glad when her lover came. A flood of questions, surmises, hazarded opinions about office affairs, poured from her then. She was free at last to talk as she liked about what absorbed her so much; she had an audience that would listen eagerly and attentively to everything. What would Mr. Kipps do about Bertram, and if the manuscript was really lost, what would Mrs. Inness do about it? ... Did he hear anything about the row between Mrs. Inness and Miss Reubens? Well,—she’d tell him, only she wanted first to ask his advice about whether she should go to Mr. Corey and simply tell him that Smith had certainly never given her his message?

Roy would meet this eager gossip with news of his own. Mr. Featherstone had given Walt Chase an awful call-down for promising a preferred position he had no right to, and Stubbs was starting on a trip to Chicago and St. Louis. There was talk of putting Francis Holme in charge of the Book Sales Department, and Roy hoped he’d get it instead of Van Alstyne. And what did Jeannette think the chances would be of Horatio Stephens getting Miss Reuben’s job if Miss Reubens quit on account of Mrs. Inness?

Roy would tire eventually of this shop talk. He longed to reach the love-making stage of the evening; he was eager to tell her how much he adored her, and to have her confess she cared for him in return; he liked to have her nestle close against him, his arms about her, to hold her to him and have her raise her lips to his each time he bent over her. But Jeannette grew less and less inclined these days to surrender herself to these embraces. Each time Roy mentioned love, she would tell him not to be silly, and would speak of another office affair. It distressed her lover; he would fidget unhappily, not quite understanding how she eluded him. Again and again he would return to the question of their marriage. Did Jeannette think March would be a good month? It was three months off. Yes, March would be all right, but did he suppose Miss Reubens was really overworked? Roy didn’t know whether she was or not; she complained a good deal, he admitted. But now about where they were to live; he had heard of a little house in Flatbush that could be rented for twenty dollars a month. How did she feel about living in Brooklyn?

But marriage did not interest her for the present; she was too much absorbed in the affairs of the publishing company. Weddings could wait; hers could, anyhow. Just now she wanted Roy to help her guess the salaries of everyone in the office.

And when, as ten and ten-thirty and eleven o’clock approached, Roy, conscious of the passing minutes, would press his love-making to a point where Jeannette could no longer divert him, she would send him home. She would suddenly remember she had her stockings to wash out, or gloves to clean before she went to bed. She would realize at the moment, how dreadfully tired she was, and the morrow always presented a difficult day.

“You must go now, Roy,” she would say. “You simply must go. I’m dead and I’ve got to get some sleep. Please say good-night.”

“Not until you kiss me,” he would insist.

“... There. Now go.”

“But tell me first you love me?”

“Oh, Roy!”

“No,—you must tell me.”

“Why, of course; you know I do.”

“Lots?”

“Yes—yes.”

“And you’ll marry me?”

“Surely.”

“When?”

“Now, Roy, you must go. I tell you I’m dropping, I’m so tired.”

“But tell me when you’ll marry me?”

“Well,—whenever we’re ready.”

“You darling! Kiss me again.”

“Roy!”

“Kiss me.... Oh, kiss me good.”

“Good-night!”

“Good-night.... You darling!”

CHAPTER V

§ 1

Roy wanted to be married; he wanted Jeannette to set the date; he wanted her to make up her mind where she preferred to live, and to start making plans accordingly. Just before Christmas his salary was raised five dollars a week and the last barrier—for him—to the wedding was removed. There was nothing to prevent their being married at once. Everyone agreed, even Jeannette herself, that a hundred dollars a month would be sufficient for their needs the first year. With a mysterious air, Mrs. Sturgis hinted at responsibilities that might come to them, but Roy’s salary would undoubtedly be raised more than once by that time. She liked her daughter’s promised husband; he had such an honest, clean face, his eyes were so clear and blue. He made her think of her Ralph. She felt she could with safety entrust Jeannette’s happiness to him. Alice was frankly a warm admirer of her prospective brother-in-law. She agreed with everything he said and always sided with him in an argument. Mother, sister and future husband shared the opinion that the marriage must soon take place; there was no sense in Jeannette’s wearing herself to death down there at that office; she took it all too seriously; she was undermining her health.

Jeannette, with vague misgivings, agreed. It was too bad; she liked the business life so much. But marriage was the thing; she must make up her mind to be married and settle down in a little house with Roy over in Brooklyn,—presumably. She thought of the dish-washing, bed-making, carpet-sweeping, cooking, and shuddered. She hated domesticity. Alice would have loved it; but she was different from Alice.

Roy? ... Oh, she loved Roy, she guessed, but not with the fluttering pulse and quickened breath he had once occasioned. She liked him; he was sweet and companionable. Sometimes she felt very motherly toward him, liked to brush his stuck-up hair and rest her cheek against his. She could see herself happy with him, knowing she would always dominate him and he was disarmingly amiable. Sometimes she thought about babies. She wouldn’t mind having them. She had always imagined she would like one some day, to dandle about and cuddle close to her. Roy was sure to be a sweet-tempered father. But she sighed when she thought of the office, the progress she was making there, her popularity, and particularly the five dollars a week that was her own to spend just as she pleased. She loved that five dollars; once she touched the soft greenback to her lips.

She agreed to be married on the second of April.

§ 2

It was shortly after the beginning of the new year that the news went around the office that Mr. Smith was going;—fired, everyone decided. No one knew how the rumor got about, but there was universal and secret rejoicing. It was whispered that, as Mr. Corey’s secretary, he had been indiscreet.

There were to be other changes in the office. Miss Travers was to take Smith’s place, Mr. Holme was to be put in complete charge of the Book Sales department, Van Alstyne was leaving, and Miss Holland was to go downstairs to assist Mr. Kipps.

Jeannette, excited by these readjustments, surmised that her own news of resignation would create its particular stir. How interested everyone would be to learn that she and Roy Beardsley of the Advertising Department were to be married! There would be a lot of rejoicing and good wishes. The office would consider it a happy match. Her going would be regretted,—she knew that she was valued,—but all would be glad nevertheless that she and young Beardsley were going to be man and wife. An ideal couple!—Happy romance!—Miss Sturgis and Mr. Beardsley! How delightful! Well—well!

If everyone was sure to think so well of her marriage, why should she have any doubts about it?

She was pondering on this, one day, while mechanically folding her letters and putting them into their proper envelopes, when there came a summons from Mr. Corey. She found him idly thumbing the pages of an advance dummy of one of the magazines. When she had seated herself and flapped back her note-book for his dictation, he asked her without preamble how she would like the idea of being his secretary. He elaborated upon what he should expect of her: there would be plenty of hard work, long hours sometimes, she might have to come back occasionally in the evenings, and there must be no gossiping with other employees of the company or outside of the office.

“What goes on in here, what you learn from my letters or see from my correspondence, what you come to know of my business or private life, must be kept strictly to yourself. Nothing must be repeated,—not even what may seem to you a trivial, insignificant fact. I wish to have no secrets from my secretary, and I do not wish my affairs discussed with anyone, not even with members of the firm, such as Mr. Kipps, or Mr. Featherstone. Understand? Miss Holland thinks you’re qualified to fill the position,—recommends you warmly,—and Mr. Kipps has a good word for you. Personally I have a feeling you will do very well, and that I can trust you. If you think you can do the work, we will start you at twenty-five a week.... What do you say?”

Jeannette’s throat went dry, her temples throbbed, her face burned. Visions swift, tormenting, rose before her: she saw Roy, her mother, sister!—she saw herself a bride, a wife, with hair hanging about her face, bending over a steaming pan full of dirty dishes; she saw herself sitting where Mr. Smith had sat, moving about the office, respected, looked up to, feared and conciliated. She thought of the number of times she had said that Smith was of small help to his chief, and the number of times, in her secret soul, she had pictured herself in some such post as his, helping, protecting, serving as she knew she could help, protect and serve. She gazed at the kind face with its crown of silvery white, and into the dark eyes studying her, as she felt rising up strong within her the consciousness of how she could work for this man, and be to him all he could ever expect in a secretary. The sadness that surrounded him, the big fight he was waging to make his business a success touched her imagination. She sensed his need of her,—his great need of her,—and she saw in the dim future how dependent he would grow to be on her. She would have a part in his struggle; she could help him achieve his ambition as he could help her achieve hers. Suddenly Roy’s stricken face interposed again. Rebellion rose passionately! ... But it was too late. She was going to be married; she was going to be Roy’s wife.... Yet how desperately she longed to be this big man’s secretary! She thought of the sensation the promotion would cause, how it would stagger Miss Foster, Miss Bixby, the other girls,—how it would impress her mother, Alice, —Roy!

Her strained, hard expression brought a puzzled look to her employer’s face. She tried to speak; her lips only moved soundlessly.

“Well, well,—you don’t have to make up your mind at once,” Mr. Corey said. “Suppose you try it for a month or two. I don’t think you’ll find it as hard as you anticipate. I am away for some months every year,—I go abroad in the spring,—and while that does not mean a vacation for you, the work is naturally easier. I would greatly appreciate loyalty and conscientiousness. I think you have just the qualities. Try it, as I suggest, until, say the first of March, and then we’ll see how we get along together and whether you think the work too hard.”

She could not bring herself to tell him she was going to be married, that she was thinking of resigning in a few weeks; she could not dash from his hand the cup, brimming with all her ambitions realized, which he held out to her so persuasively. No,—not just yet. He suggested she try the position until the first of March. There was nothing to hinder her from doing that! The glory would be hers, even if she were to enjoy it but for six weeks. She would be “Mr. Corey’s secretary” before the office; everyone would know of it, her mother, Alice, Roy,—all of them would see how she had succeeded. On the first of March,—went her swift mind,—she could talk it over with Mr. Corey, tell him the work was beyond her strength, that she didn’t like it,—or that she was going to be married! It wouldn’t matter then.

“Well,—what do you say?” Mr. Corey leaned forward slightly, his shrewd eyes watching her.

She swallowed hard, and met his steady gaze.

“Yes,—I’ll try it. I—I think I can do it.”

“Good. Then we’ll start in to-morrow. Mr. Smith leaves us Saturday. He can show you about my private filing system and some of the ropes before he goes.”

§ 3

Quietly she told the news to her mother and sister that evening. At once there was a hubbub; they were lavish with kisses, hugs and congratulations. Alice, clapping palms, exclaimed:

“That will give you seventy-five—ninety dollars more to spend on your trousseau! ... Oh, what will you do with it, Janny?”

“It’s more than Roy gets,” Mrs. Sturgis commented proudly with an elegant gesture of her hand.

“No, he was raised just before Christmas.”

“Well, it’s as much anyway. Think of it: twenty-five dollars a week! ... For a girl! ... Why, your father never earned much more!”

Roy was delighted, too.

“By golly!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “I told you, didn’t I? I guess I can tell a good stenographer when I see one. You were worrying—remember?—when you first went down there whether you were going to make good or not.... Well,—say,—isn’t that great! ... I guess I’ve got a pretty smart girl picked out for a wife; hey, old darling? You’re just a wonder, Janny! You can do anything. I wish I was good enough for you, that’s all.... Poor old C. B.! He’ll be disappointed as the deuce when you quit!”

Nevertheless, within the next few days Roy wondered if he altogether liked the change in Jeannette’s status. Her manner towards him became different. She no longer would gossip about office matters, and during business hours she treated him with cold formality. There had always been a pleased light in her eyes at a chance encounter with him and sometimes he would find a little note on his desk she had left there. But now she held him at a distance rather pompously, he thought. She answered “I don’t know,” or “Mr. Corey didn’t say,” when he asked some casual question about business. She had become close-mouthed, and gave herself an air as she went about her work.

“I can’t act differently towards you than I do towards anybody else,” she said in her defence when he complained. “Don’t you see, Roy, I’ve got to be a kind of machine now. I’ve got to treat everybody alike. Mr. Corey wouldn’t like it if he thought I was intimate with you.”

“But we’re engaged to be married!”

“Yes, of course,—but he doesn’t know it. And I want to make good, even if it’s only for a few weeks. You understand, don’t you, Roy?”

Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn’t. Jeannette did not concern herself. She was absorbed in adequately filling this coveted job which satisfied her heart and soul and brain.

The hour of triumph when the news went abroad of her promotion was as gratifying as she could possibly have wished. The girls crowded about her, congratulating her, wringing her hands; Miss Foster impulsively kissed her. Jeannette knew they envied her; she knew that, for the time being, they even hated her; but their assumed pleasure in her good fortune was none-the-less agreeable. Miss Reubens complained sourly that the general office had lost its only efficient stenographer; Mr. Cavendish charmingly expressed his personal satisfaction in her advancement and gave her hand a warm pressure of friendliness; Mr. Kipps and Mr. Featherstone both complimented her with hearty enthusiasm. Jeannette was not cynical but she believed she put a proper value on these felicitations,—particularly those of these last two gentlemen. Mr. Corey was indeed the dominant power behind them all; their destinies lay largely in his hands, and she was now the go-between, the avenue of approach between the underlings and leader. As they had feared and disliked Smith, so they would fear and perhaps dislike her. She hoped they would learn to like her in time, but it was natural they should feel a great respect for President Corey’s secretary, and be anxious to gain her favor, hoping that to each of them she might prove a “friend at court.” Still they were not wholly insincere. Miss Holland, Jeannette felt, was genuinely pleased. The older woman held both her hands and told her how happy the news had made her; her eyes shone with the light of real pleasure. The girl felt her to be indeed a friend.

Jeannette took her new work with the utmost seriousness. She determined at the outset to treat everyone in the office with absolute impartiality, to carry whatever anybody entrusted to her to the President’s attention with an equal measure of fidelity, to see to it that Mr. Kipps or Horatio Stephens would fare the same at her hands. She planned to execute her secretarial duties automatically, disinterestedly, with the impersonal functioning of a machine.

But she discovered the futility of this scheme of conduct within the first few days. Miss Reubens wished to speak to Mr. Corey. Was Mr. Corey busy? Would Miss Sturgis be so good as to tell her when she might see him for a few minutes? Jeannette knew, as it happened, what Miss Reubens wished to interview Mr. Corey about; Miss Reubens had already discussed it with him, and he had already advised her. It would be merely adding to his troubled day to go over the matter again; nothing more would be accomplished. Besides, Jeannette knew Miss Reubens bored Mr. Corey just as she bored everybody else. The interview did not take place.

Again, Mr. Cavendish had promised a check to a distinguished contributor to Corey’s Commentary; he had assured the author-statesman it would be in the mail that afternoon without fail; would Miss Sturgis manage to get Mr. Corey to sign it at once? Miss Sturgis could and did, but a check to an engraving company, which Mr. Olmstead wished to be sent the same day, waited until next morning for the hour which Mr. Corey set apart for check-signing.

Her first concern was for Mr. Corey himself. She had guessed he was harassed and harried, but had no idea how greatly harassed and harried until she came to work at close quarters with him. He had tremendous capacity, was an indefatigable worker, but she had not observed his methods a week before she noted he did far too much that was unnecessary. Insignificant things engaged and held his attention; he frittered away his time upon trivialities. She set herself to save him what she could and began by keeping the office force from troubling him. Mr. Corey had a delightful personality, was a charming and stimulating talker, a most pleasing companion; his secretary understood quite clearly why every member of the staff liked to sit in an easy chair in his office and spend half-an-hour with him, chatting about details. He was too ready to squander his precious moments on anyone who came to him. It was difficult to sidetrack these time-wasters but in some measure she succeeded. Memorandums that came addressed to him, she dared answer herself; she even went so far as to lift papers from his desk and return them whence they came with a typed note attached: “Mr. Corey thinks you had better handle this. J. S.” Her daring frightened her sometimes. It was inevitable she should run into difficulties.

One afternoon the “buzzer” at her desk summoned her; it sounded more peremptory than usual.

“Miss Sturgis,” Mr. Corey addressed her, “Mr. Kipps left some information about our insurance on my desk a day or two ago; have you seen it?”

“Yes, sir, I returned it to him early this morning and suggested that he take care of the matter for you.” As she spoke she felt the color rushing to her face.

Corey’s black brows came together in an annoyed frown. He cleared his throat with a little impatient cough, and jerked at his mustache.

“I wish, Miss Sturgis,—I wish you would not be quite so officious.”

Jeannette squared herself to the criticism, and stood very erect, returning his look.

“I thought Mr. Kipps could take care of the matter, without bothering you further,” she said, beginning to tremble.

There was silence in the room. The girl’s defiant figure, tall and straight, confronted the man at the desk, and the dark frown that bore down upon her. She was very beautiful as she stood there, with the warm color tinging her olive-hued cheeks, her eyes clear and unwavering, her head flung back, her small hands shut, resolute, unflinching. Perhaps Corey saw it, perhaps it occurred to him that she showed a fine courage, bearding him in this fashion, facing him with such spirit, acknowledging her high-handedness yet defending it. As he considered the matter, it came to him that she was right. Kipps was perfectly capable of taking care of this insurance business himself.

What was passing in the man’s mind the girl never knew. Slowly she saw the scowl drift away, the stern face relax. He swung his chair toward the window and contemplated the horizon. The sun was setting over the Jersey shore, and the glow of a red sky was reflected on his face.

“Very well,” he said at last. It was ungracious, it was curt, but there was nothing more. There was no dismissal. The girl waited a few minutes longer, then turned and quitted the room.

There were errors—serious errors—for which she was accountable. She incorrectly addressed envelopes in the hurry of dispatching them, she mixed letters and sent them to the wrong people, she mislaid certain correspondence that upset the whole office, and she kept the great Zeit Heitmüller, painter and sculptor,—of whom she had never heard,—waiting for more than an hour in the reception room, though Mr. Corey had begged him to call. Mr. Featherstone criticized her sharply when she neglected sending off some advertising copy after Mr. Corey had O.K.’d it, and she was aware that Mr. Olmstead complained of her in great annoyance when she returned to him an inventory he had prepared after it had lain four days on Mr. Corey’s desk. At times she felt herself an absolute failure, and at others knew she was steadily gaining ground in the confidence and regard of the man she served. There were hard days, days when everything went wrong, when everybody was cross, when it was close and suffocating in the office, and whatever one touched felt gritty with the grime of the dusty wind that swept the streets. There were days when Corey was short and critical, when whatever Jeannette did, seemed to irritate him. A dozen times during a morning or afternoon she might be near to tears and would rehearse in her mind the words in which she would tell him that since she could not do the work to satisfy him, he had better find someone else to take her place. There were other days when he chatted with her in the merriest of moods, asked how she was getting along, inquired about herself and her family, looked up smilingly when she stood before his desk to interrupt him, and thanked her for having protected him from some trifling annoyance.

Her heart swelled with pride and satisfaction the first Saturday she tore off a narrow strip from the neat, fat little envelope Miss Travers handed her, and found folded therein two ten-and one five-dollar bills. Twenty-five dollars a week! She rolled the words under her tongue; she liked to hear herself whisper it. “Twenty-five dollars a week!” There were hundreds and hundreds of men who didn’t earn so much, and a vastly larger number of women!

Her mother, warmly seconded by Alice, refused to allow her to contribute more than ten dollars toward the household expenses. She had her trousseau to buy, they argued, and this was Jeannette’s own money and she ought to spend it just as she chose and for what she chose. Finances at the moment were much less of a problem than they had been for the little household. A wealthy pupil of Signor Bellini with a fine contralto voice had engaged Mrs. Sturgis as her regular accompanist, and paid her ten dollars every time she played for her at an evening concert.

Jeannette allowed herself to be persuaded, and Saturday afternoons became for her orgies of shopping. She priced everything; she ransacked the department stores. She knew what was being asked for a certain type and finish of tailor suit on Fifth Avenue, and what “identically the same thing” could be bought for on Fourteenth Street. She got the tailor suit, and a new hat, a pair of smart, low walking pumps, some half-silk stockings, be-ribboned underwear, a taffeta petticoat, everything she wanted. She lunched at the St. Denis in what she felt to be regal luxury, and indulged herself in a bag of chocolate caramels afterwards. The joy of having money to spend intoxicated her; she revelled in the glory of it; it was exciting, wonderful, marvellous. Not one of the things she bought would she allow herself to wear; everything was to be saved until she was married, and became Mrs. Roy Beardsley.

Her future husband took her one Sunday to inspect the small brick house in Flatbush which could be rented for twenty dollars a month. The weather was unduly warm,—an exquisite day with a golden sun,—one of those foretastes of spring that are so beguilingly deceptive. From the janitor, who showed them over it, they learned that the house would cost them twenty-two dollars a month. It was one of a solid, unrelieved row of fourteen others exactly like it, all warmed by a central heating system, and supplied similarly with water and gas. It was dark, the floors were worn and splintery, the windows dingy; the whole place smelled of old carpets and damp plaster. Still it had three bedrooms upstairs, and a living-room, a really pleasant dining-room, and a kitchen on the ground floor. Roy watched Jeannette’s face eagerly as they stepped from room to room, but he failed to detect any sign of enthusiasm. It impressed the girl as anything but cheerful. She saw herself day after day alone in this place, sweeping, dusting, making beds, washing dishes, getting herself a plate of pick-up lunch and eating it at the end of the kitchen table, trying to read, trying to sew, trying to amuse herself during the empty afternoons until it was time to start dinner and wait for her husband to come home. After the bustle and excitement of the office, it would be insufferably dull.

As they waited a moment on the front steps for the janitor to lock up after them, Jeannette noticed a large, fat woman in a shabby negligée, watching them from the upper window of the adjoining house, her plump, pink elbows resting on a pillow, as she leaned out upon the sill, enjoying the mellowness of the afternoon. On the ground floor behind the looped lace curtains of a front window, her husband was asleep in a large upholstered armchair, Sunday newspapers scattered about him, the comic section across his round, fat abdomen.

“These would be the kind of neighbors she would have!” thought Jeannette. Oh, it wasn’t what she wanted! It wasn’t her kind of a life—at all! She would be lonely, lonely, lonely.

Roy was getting twenty-five dollars a week; she was getting twenty-five dollars a week. Why couldn’t they go on working together in the same office and have a joint income of fifty dollars a week,—two hundred dollars a month! The idea fired her.

But she found no one to share her enthusiasm. Alice pressed a dubious finger-tip against her lips; Roy frowned and said frankly he didn’t think it was the right way for a couple to start in when they got married; her mother indulged in firm little shakes of her head that set her round cheeks quivering. When the heated discussion of the evening was over and Roy had taken himself home, Mrs. Sturgis came to sit on the edge of Jeannette’s bed after the girl had retired, and in the darkness discoursed upon certain delicate matters which evidently her dear daughter hadn’t considered.

“I hope my girl won’t have responsibilities come upon her too soon after she’s married,” she said, after a few gentle clearings of her throat, “but, dearie, you know about babies, and you’ll want to have one, and it’s right and proper that you should. But where would you be if a—if a—you found you were going to have one,—and you were working in an office? You must consider these things. Roy’s perfectly right in not wanting his wife at a dirty old desk all day.... And then, dearie, there are certain decencies, certain proprieties. A bride cannot be too careful; she must always be modest. Suppose you actually tried this—this wild scheme of yours, and after your happy honeymoon, went back to the office among your old associates, the men and women with whom you’ve grown familiar; imagine how it would seem to them, and what dreadful thoughts they might think about you and Roy! One of the lovely things about marriage, Janny, is the dear little home waiting to shield the young bride.”

“Oh, but Mama ...” began Jeannette in weary protest. But she stopped there. What use was it to argue? None of them understood her; none of them was able to grasp her point of view.

Roy voiced the only argument that had weight with her.

“I don’t think C. B. would like it; I don’t think he would want to have a secretary who was married to somebody in the same office.”

Jeannette felt that this would be a fact. No matter how well she might please Mr. Corey, a secretary who was married to another employee of the company would not be satisfactory. It was highly probable that in the event of her marriage he would be unwilling for her to continue with him.

No, it was plain that if she married Roy, she must resign, she must let go her ambition, her hopes for success in business, and she must accept Flatbush, and the dismal little brick house, the unprepossessing neighbors, and the lonely, lonely days.

Well—suppose—suppose—suppose she didn’t marry!

The relief the idea brought was startling. But she couldn’t bring herself to give up Roy,—she couldn’t hurt him! She loved him,—she loved him dearly! Never in the last few months since he had come back to her from California had she been so sure she loved him as now. Those eager blue eyes of his, that unruly stuck-up hair, that quaint smile, that supple, boyish figure,—so sinuous and young and clean,—she couldn’t give them up!

A battle began within her. It was the old struggle,—the struggle of ambition and independence, against love and drudgery, for marriage meant that to her; she could think of it in no other way.

Daily in her work at the office, she felt a steady progress; daily, she beheld herself becoming increasingly efficient; daily, more and more important matters were entrusted to her.

“Thank you very much, Miss Sturgis.” “That’s fine, Miss Sturgis.” “Please arrange this, Miss Sturgis.” “Miss Sturgis, will you kindly attend to this matter yourself?”

These from Mr. Corey, and in the office she overheard:

“Well,—get Miss Sturgis to do that.” “Better ask Miss Sturgis.” “Miss Sturgis will know.” “If you want C. B.’s O.K., get Miss Sturgis to put it up to him.”

It was wine to her. She felt herself growing ever more confident, established, secure.

§ 4

“Now, Janny,—what are you going to do about a house or an apartment or something where we can begin housekeeping? Gee, I hate the idea of boarding! We ought to have a place we can call our home. April second is only two weeks off, and I don’t suppose it’s possible to find anything now. We’ll have to go to a hotel or a boarding-house for a while until we can look ’round.... Do you realize, Miss Sturgis, you’re going to be Mrs. Roy Beardsley inside of a fortnight!”

“Roy—dear!” she exclaimed helplessly.

“But, my darling,—you’ve got to make up your mind.”

Make up her mind? She could not. She listened dumbly, miserably while her mother and sister discussed, with the man she had promised to marry, the details of the wedding, and what the young couple had better do until they could find a suitable place in which to start housekeeping.

“We’ll go over to the church on Eighty-ninth Street about six o’clock, and Doctor Fitzgibbons will perform the ceremony and then we’ll come back here for a happy wedding supper,” planned Mrs. Sturgis confidently.

On what was she expected to live? asked Jeannette, mutinously, of herself. Twenty-five dollars a week for both of them? It had seemed ample when they first discussed it. Her mother’s income for herself and two daughters had rarely been more and frequently less. Mrs. Sturgis paid thirty dollars a month rent for the apartment, and Alice was supposed to have ten dollars a week on which to run the table; in reality she provided the food that sustained the three of them at an expenditure of one dollar a day. But at forty dollars a month for food and twenty or twenty-five a month for rent and at least five dollars a week for Roy’s lunches and carfare, what was she, Jeannette, to have left to spend on clothes or amusement? She would be a prisoner in that dismal little Flatbush house, bound hand and foot to it for the lack of carfare across the river to indulge in a harmless inspection of shop windows! Now she was free,—now she could get herself a gay petticoat if she wanted one, or a new spring hat in time for Easter, or take Alice and herself to a Saturday matinée and nibble chocolates with her, hanging excitedly over the rail of the gallery from front row seats! And she was to relinquish all this liberty, which now was actually hers, actually her own to enjoy and delight in rightfully and lawfully, and manacle her hands, rivet chains about her ankles and enter this prison, whose door her mother, her sister and Roy held open for her, and where they expected her to remain contentedly and happily for the rest of her life!

It was too much! It was preposterous! It was inhuman! She didn’t love any man enough to make a sacrifice so great. She was self-supporting, independent,—beholden to no one,—she could take care of herself for life if necessary, and after her room and board were paid for, she would always have fifteen dollars a week—sixty dollars a month!—to spend as foolishly or as wisely as she chose with no one to call her to account. She hugged her little Saturday envelopes to her breast; they were hers, she had earned them, she would never give them up,—never—never—never!

§ 5

She persuaded Roy to postpone the wedding. There was no special need for hurry. It would require a lot more saving before they could properly furnish a little house or an apartment; it was much wiser for them to start in right; in a few months they could have two or three hundred dollars. She presented the matter to him in a rush of words one evening and, as she had foreseen, he was overborne by her vehemence. Roy was sweet-tempered, he was amiable, he was always willing to give way in an argument. Often she had felt impatient with him for this easy tractability. He didn’t have enough backbone! Even now his readiness to concede what she asked disappointed her. Something within her clamored for an indignant rejection of her proposal. She wanted him to insist with an oath that their marriage must take place at once, that she must make good her promise without further to-do. He lost something very definite in her regard at that moment; he never meant quite so much to her again. It was the pivotal point in their relationship.

Alice let her hands and sewing fall into her lap when her sister told her the marriage was to be postponed, and said anxiously: “Oh, Janny,—I’m awfully sorry,” but her mother unexpectedly approved.

“There’s no need of your rushing into all the troubles and worries of marriage, dearie,—until you’re quite, quite prepared. I think you’re very wise to wait a little while; it’s right and proper; you and Roy are showing a lot of real common sense. You’ll have some capital to start in with, and you can take your time about finding just the right kind of a place to live in. And then it means I’m going to have my darling all summer.... Only,” she added with a reproachful glance at the girl and a pout of lips and cheeks, “I wish you’d give up that horrid, old office and stay at home with your mother and sister, and have a few months to yourself before you fly away to be a bride.”

What a relief to know she had escaped for a time at least the net that had been spread for her! With head held high, and a free heart, with eager step and a pulse tuned to the joy of living, Jeannette plunged on with her work.

CHAPTER VI

§ 1

The cold of winter clung with a tenacious grip to the city that year until far into April. Jeannette had eagerly looked forward to the spectacular flower-vendors’ sale of spring blooms in Union Square on the Saturday before Easter but a bitter wind began to assert itself early in the day and by ten o’clock had wrought pitiful havoc with the brave show of potted lilies and azaleas. The Square was littered with their battered petals and torn leaves. Three days before the first of May a flurry of snow clothed the city again in white, and then, without warning, summer breathed its hot, moist breath upon the town. The air was heavy with water; a mist, thick and enervating, spread itself like a miasma from a stagnant pool, through the streets. A tropical heat,—the wet clinging heat of a conservatory,—enveloped New York. And in June came the rain, an intermittent downpour that lasted for weeks.

It was a trying time for everyone. The office felt damp, and there was a constant smell all day of wet rubber and damp woolens. Black streams of water meandered over the floor from the tips of wet umbrellas, stacked in corners. On the fifth floor the roof leaked, and old Hodgson had to be moved elsewhere. In the midst of the general discomfort Mr. Corey fell sick.

It proved nothing more serious than a heavy bronchial cold, but his physician ordered him to bed, and he was warned he must not venture into the damp streets until the last vestige of the cold had disappeared. The doctor consented to let him see his secretary and to keep in touch with the office by telephone. It was thus that Jeannette came to visit her employer in his own home.

Mr. Corey lived in one of three cream-painted brick houses on Tenth Street, a hundred yards or so from the corner of Fifth Avenue. The houses were quaint affairs, only two stories in height, with square-paned glass in the shallow windows and wide, deep-panelled front doors ornamented in the center with heavy, shining brass knockers. They were old buildings, dating back to the early nineteenth century, and had somewhat of a colonial atmosphere about them. The Corey family consisted of Mrs. Corey and two children,—a boy of eighteen, Willis Corey, in his first year at Harvard, and a girl, Helen, a year younger, who lived at home and was called “Babs.” Jeannette was disappointed, not to say disturbed, at meeting her employer’s wife.

“I wasn’t aware that I had a preconceived idea of her,” she said to Alice in recounting her impressions. “Mr. Corey seems to be devoted to her, and has a large silver-framed photograph of her on his desk. I supposed from her picture and from the way he speaks about her that she was the same kind of earnest, hard-headed, clear-thinking person as himself. But she isn’t that way at all. In the first place, she’s very tall and stately; she’s got lots of hair,—it’s quite gray and very curly,—and she piles it up on top of her head and always wears a bandeau or a fillet to bind it. She’s rather intense in her manner and a trifle theatrical. She’s a handsome woman, faded of course now, but she has very large dark eyes, that she uses effectively, and really beautiful brows. She affects the weirdest of costumes, all lace and floating scarf, with lots of color. She had several rings on her fingers and bracelets dangling and jingling on her wrists. I thought her stupid; I mean really dense. When I got to the house she came out to the hall where I was waiting, led me into the parlor and made me sit down. She said she wanted to have a good talk with me. She was so glad Mr. Smith had gone, and she went on at once to say how she had urged ‘Chandler!’—it was funny to hear Mr. Corey called by his first name!—how she had urged him to make a change for a long time. She said he said to her: ‘Where do you think I could find anybody to replace him?’ and she said: ‘Well, how about that clever Miss Sturgis who’s just come to you?’ She told me she had begged him for weeks to give me a trial before he consented.

“You know, Allie, it rather puzzled me what her object could be in romancing that way, for, of course, I don’t believe a word of it. She never heard of me until Mr. Corey happened to tell her he had a new secretary! And then she went on to talk about the business. My dear, it was pathetic! She wanted me to think that she knew about everything that went on at the office, that Mr. Corey kept nothing from her, and talked over every important decision with her before he made up his mind. I almost laughed in her face! She doesn’t know one single thing about his affairs. She hasn’t the faintest idea, for instance, that he’s in debt, that the paper company could wind up his affairs to-morrow if it wanted to, nor what bank has helped to finance him from the start, nor where the money comes from that buys her food and clothing. She supposes, I presume, that it comes from profits. Profits are a negligible quantity with the Chandler B. Corey Company and have been ever since Mr. Corey launched it. It’s getting in better shape all the time, and some day there will be profits.

“Mrs. Corey looked brightly at me with her large soulful eyes and said: ‘Those two volumes of The Life and Letters of Alexander Hamilton are quite wonderful, aren’t they? Such beautiful bookmaking!’ and ‘We were quite successful with The Den, weren’t we?’ Imagine, Alice! ‘We!’ What she knows about the business is about as much as she can gather from the books Mr. Corey publishes and occasionally brings home to her! She talked a lot about the magazines, and asked me if I didn’t think Miss Reubens was making a very wonderful periodical out of The Wheel of Fortune.

“I just nodded and agreed with her. She was trying to impress me how well-informed she was, and I let her think she succeeded. Toward the end she got started on Mr. Corey, and how hard he worked, and how keenly I ought to feel it my duty to save him from petty annoyances; I must consider myself a guard, a sentinel, stationed at the door of his tent to keep the rabble from disturbing the great man! I let her rave on, but it was all I could do to listen. I thought as I sat there that in all probability she was the noisiest and most disturbing of the lot. She wound up by telling me what the doctor had said to her about Mr. Corey having caught cold, and she wanted to urge me particularly to guard him against draughts. Then she asked me if Mr. Corey ever took me to lunch! Now what do you think made her ask me a question like that? You don’t suppose she’s jealous? It seems too ridiculous even to think about. My goodness! When you see the kind of women some men get for wives you wonder how they put up with them!”

§ 2

All Mr. Corey’s personal mail passed through Jeannette’s hands; she opened and read most of it. He dictated to her his letters to his son at Cambridge, and even those to his wife and Babs when they went to Kennebunkport for the summer. Jeannette learned that Willis had been madly in love with a married woman who sang in the choir of a Fifth Avenue church, that he was given to midnight carousing, smoked far too many cigarettes, that his mother spoiled him, and his father was disgusted with him. With the aid of a “cramming” school, he had somehow wiggled himself into Harvard, but Mr. Corey had made him distinctly understand that at the first complaint concerning him he would have to withdraw and go to work. Jeannette came to know, too, that Babs was epileptic and that early in May she had had the first fit in two years, and that the day after her mother and herself had arrived in Kennebunkport, she had had another. Letters of a very agitated nature passed between the parents as to what should now be done. Nothing was decided. Likewise Jeannette learned that Mrs. Corey was at times recklessly extravagant. Her husband repeatedly had to call her to account, and sometimes they had violent quarrels about the matter. Just before Mrs. Corey departed for Maine she had bought six hats for herself and Babs, and had charged over three hundred dollars’ worth of new clothing. Mr. Corey had been exasperated, as only a few weeks before he had made a point of asking her to economize in every way possible during the coming summer. He himself, Jeannette knew, must shortly undergo a more or less serious operation, of which his family was totally ignorant, that he was worried because his Life Insurance Company had declined after an examination to increase the amount of his insurance, and that he had successfully engineered a loan to wipe off his indebtedness to the big Pulp and Paper Company.

There was little that concerned him with which she did not become acquainted. She knew that his house on Tenth Street was heavily mortgaged and that on the second loan carried by the property he was paying an outrageous rate of interest; that on the tenth of every month he never failed to send a check for sixty-six dollars and sixty-seven cents to a man in Memphis, Tennessee, that his dentist threatened to sue him unless he settled a bill that had been owing for two years; that on the first of every month, Mr. Olmstead deposited to his account in the Chemical National Bank five hundred dollars; that no month ever passed without his chief sending for the old man and directing him to deposit an additional hundred, or two hundred, or sometimes three hundred to his account, and that these sums appeared on the books of the company as personal indebtedness. Frequently this levy upon the Company’s bank balance upset Mr. Olmstead, and more than once Jeannette heard the old cashier emphatically assert as he rapped his eye-glasses in his agitated fashion upon his thumb-nail:

“All right, Mr. Corey,—you’re the boss here, and I’ve got to do as you say, but I won’t answer for it, Mr. Corey. I warn you, sir, we won’t have enough for next week’s pay-roll!”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” Mr. Corey would soothe him. “We’ll manage somehow; you pay the money in the bank for me and we’ll talk about it afterwards.”

There were even more intimate things about the man she served which became his secretary’s knowledge. He sometimes took the sixtieth of a grain of strychnine when he was unusually tired, he dyed his mustache and eyebrows, and wore hygienic underwear for which he paid six dollars a garment. She had charge of his personal bank account. She drew the checks, put them before him for his signature, and sent them out in the mail. While Mrs. Corey was in Kennebunkport, she paid all the household expenses of the establishment on Tenth Street: electric light and milk bills, grocer’s and butcher’s accounts, the wages of the cook. She knew what were Mr. Corey’s dues and expenses at the Lotus Club, what he paid for his clothes, what he owed at Brooks Bros., and at the Everett House where he had a charge account and signed checks for his lunches. There were no secrets in his life that were closed to her; he had less than most men to conceal; she considered him the most generous, the most upright, the most admirable man in the world.

§ 3

It was on a hot Saturday afternoon in July when no one but themselves were in the office, that Jeannette told Mr. Corey about Roy. She had not seen quite so much of Roy lately; he had been away on a business trip, and Horatio Stephens had asked him to spend his fortnight’s vacation with himself and family at Asbury Park. He had written her letters full of endearments and underscored assertions of love, and had returned to plead eagerly that she set the day for the wedding and begin to plan with him how and where they should live. His earnestness made her realize she could temporize no longer.

“It isn’t that I don’t care for him,” she said to Mr. Corey; “it’s just that I don’t want to get married, I guess.”

The windows were open and a gentle hot wind stirred the loose papers on the desk. A lazy rumble of traffic rose from the street, punctuated now and then by the shrill voices of children in the Square, and the merry jingle of a hurdy-gurdy.

“You mustn’t trifle with your happiness, Miss Sturgis,” Corey said, pulling at his mustache thoughtfully. “You know this is all very well here for a time, but you must think of the future.”

Jeannette stared out of the window and for some minutes there was silence; she spoke presently with knitted brows.

“Oh, I’ve gone over it and over it, again and again, and it seems more than I can do to give up my independence and the fun of living my own life just yet. I—I like Mr. Beardsley; I think we’d be happy together. He’s devoted to me, and he’s most amiable,”—she glanced with a smile at her employer’s face. “My mother and my sister are eager to have me marry him, but I just can’t—can’t bring myself to give up my work and my life here to substitute matrimony.”

“No consideration for me, my dear girl, ought to influence you. I’d be sorry to lose you, of course; you’re the best secretary I ever had, and I’d be hard put to it to find anyone who could begin to fill your place even remotely. But you mustn’t think I couldn’t manage; I’d find somebody. Your duty is to yourself and living your own life.”

“It isn’t that, Mr. Corey. It’s the work that I love; I don’t want to give it up,—the excitement and the fun of it. It’s a thousand times more exhilarating than cooking and dish-washing.... And then there’s the question of finances, which, it seems to me, I’m bound to consider. Mr. Beardsley’s getting twenty-five and I’m getting twenty-five; that’s fifty dollars a week we earn, but if I marry him, we both would have to live on just his salary.”

“Yes,—that’s very true,” the man admitted.

The girl threw him a quick glance, and went on hesitatingly:

“I don’t suppose we could marry and each of us go on holding our jobs?”

Mr. Corey considered, stroking his black mustache with a thoughtful thumb and finger.

“Well,” he said slowly, “what do you gain? If you went on working, you’d find it difficult to keep house; you’d have to live in a boarding-house. And that isn’t homemaking. And then, Miss Sturgis, there’s the, question of children. What would you do about them? You wouldn’t care to have a child as long as you came downtown to an office every day.... No, I wouldn’t advise it. If you love your young man well enough, I would urge you to marry him.”

“I don’t!” Jeannette said to herself violently on her way home.

But did she? Almost with the denial, she began to wonder.

That night when Roy came to see her and asked her again for the thousandth time to name the day, she took his face between her hands and kissed him tenderly, folded his head against her breast, and with arms tight about him, pressed her lips again and again to his unruly hair.

Later, when he had gone and she was alone, she dropped upon her knees before the old davenport where they had been sitting, and wept.

It was the end of the struggle. She told no one for a long time, but in her mind she knew she would never marry him. Her work was too precious to her; her independence too dear; to give them up was demanding of her more than she had the strength to give.

END OF BOOK I