"'I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING YOU EVER SINCE YOU LEFT YOUR OFFICE,' HE SAID"
Ikey looked away so as not to see the perfect cut of it, the perfect fit of it, the utter shabbiness of it. It was her "escape" suit, too. She had slept on the hills in it to the tune of dynamiting and the flare of the burning city. She would never have another like it—never. For her job——
Her job.
She leaned back suddenly and closed her eyes. Her job. The rage of this noon was coming back again; rage, and with it a strange, new sensation—fear. She had never known fear before, not even during the earthquake days. "Only at the dentist's," she told herself, giggling half hysterically behind closed lids.
And back of it all—back of the landlady's unconcealed dislike and latest slap, back of the disintegration of a wardrobe that could not be replaced, and the question as to whether her "job" had not become an impossibility since to-day—and that job simply could not become an impossibility: one had to live—back of all this was the dull hurt, smothered and always coming again, that Bixler McFay had not taken the trouble to look her up when his regiment came through on the way to Manila.
"You may as well face that, too, while you're about it," Ikey observed sarcastically. She opened her eyes with a snap and bit into the first bun.
"The regiment was only here three days," a little voice inside of her whispered fearfully.
"Three days!" Ikey's scorn was unbounded. "If he had cared, he could have found you in three hours—and he always said he cared. It's a thing you've got to live with. It's nothing so unusual. It happens every day. Why can't you treat it like a poor relation?"
And her thoughts went back to Fort Leavenworth, and the gowns on gowns she had worn, all burned up at the St. Francis last spring, with the rest of her things, a week after she had reached the city; and Cousin Mary, suave and elegant and impressive as her chaperon; and herself, petted and made much of on all sides, and incidentally pointed out as the richest girl on the field, and an orphan; and Bixler McFay, handsome, brilliant, devoted, always on hand, always protesting——
A whimsical, sarcastic little smile curved her lips for a moment. The earthquake had certainly made a difference. A vision of Cousin Mary arose—not the suave and elegant chaperon of a wealthy young relative, but a frightened, self-centered, middle-aged woman, who had taken the earthquake as a personal affront put upon her by her young charge and insisted on being the first consideration in no matter what environment she found herself.
