Mingled with all her troubled and often-reviewed calculations, would intrude now and then the thought,—shouldn't she have to be willing to wear out and grow ugly, with hard work and insufficient nourishing? And she would have so liked to keep fresh and pretty for the time that might have come!
In the days when these things were keeping her anxious, the winter wreath was also slowly turning dry.
She found herself hemmed in and headed at every turn by the pitiless hedge and ditch of circumstance, at which girls and women in our time have to chafe and wait; and from which there seems to be no way out. Yet there are ways out from this, as from all things. One way—the way of thorough womanly home-helpfulness—was not clear to her; there are many to whom it is not clear. Yet if those to whom it is, or might be, would take it,—if those who might give it, in many forms, would give,—who knows what relief and loosening would come to others in the hard jostle and press?
There is another way out of all puzzle and perplexity and hardness; it is the Lord's special way for each one, that we cannot foresee, and that we never know until it comes. Then we discern that there has never been impossibility; that all things are open before his eyes; and that there is no temptation,—no trying of us,—to which He will not provide some end or escape.
In the first week of January, Sylvie acted upon her resolve of writing to Mr. Farron Saftleigh. She asked brief and direct questions; told him that she was obliged to request an answer without the least delay; and begged that he would render them a clear statement of all their affairs. She reminded him that he had told them that he would be responsible for their receiving a dividend of at least four per cent, at the end of the six months.
Mr. Farron Saftleigh "told" people a great many things in his genial, exhilarating business talks, which he was a great deal too wise ever to put down on paper.
Sylvie waited ten days; a fortnight; three weeks; no answer came. Mr. Farron Saftleigh had simply destroyed the letter, of no consequence at all as coming from a person not primarily concerned or authorized, and set off from Denver City the same day for a business visit to San Francisco.
Sylvie saw the plain fact; that they were penniless. And this could not be told to her mother.
She went to Desire Ledwith, and asked her what she could do.
"I would go into a household anywhere, as Dot Ingraham and Bel Bree have done, to earn board and wages, and spend my money for my mother; but I can't leave her. And there's no sewing work to get, even if I could do it at night and in honest spare time. I know, as it is, that my service isn't worth what you give me in return, and of course I cannot stay here any longer now."