There could not be many women like Anne. She gave so fully of her time and interest, and yet there were unstirred depths beneath. Roger had always felt them in sudden, sad looks that passed across Anne's eyes, in the catching of the breath that marked an almost painfully keen interest, in small, quick motions and physical responses that he had accepted as mannerisms, but now saw as revelations of that courage and ideality that was Anne.
"It wasn't easy for her to confront that rotter, but she did it, the slip of a beauty-loving thing! How she must hate an office!"
And she would probably go into just such another in a few days, perhaps a worse one. She might already have found a place. While he lay on the sand, facing the full future, she might be bent above a machine, her fine enthusiasm leashed to the narrow demands of price lists, her physical rarity the object of some cad's coarse admiration. The thought sickened Roger when it first came to him clearly, an employer trying to touch Anne's hand, pressing her knee as he forced her to needless proximity for dictation; Anne, the hurt and quivering object of those advances he had seen other girls welcome with feigned annoyance and sidelong glances. He rose quickly to escape it, although he had come to his favorite cove with a book for the whole afternoon, and began walking again across the dunes. But the picture moved beside him.
"By Jove, it isn't right. A man has a hard enough time hanging to his principles, but a girl, a worth-while girl like that who has something beyond the idea of attracting men—it's a shame."
And he could do nothing to prevent it. He could not even call Anne a friend. He did not know where she lived.
"What a simp!" He stopped and kicked the sand viciously and marveled at his own stupidity. For six months he had worked with Anne and had never asked her to go anywhere with him, or tried to know her better. He knew now that he had looked forward in the mornings to seeing her, soft and small and silvery fair at her desk. He had snatched every opportunity to talk with her. And had made none! Seen so, now, from the outside, it was incredible but true. He knew nothing of Anne whatever. Nothing. She might even be engaged to some man, no better, under the veneer with which men, physically desirous, deceive girls, than John Lowell. Perhaps worse.
Roger strode on, his shoulders hunched now as they always hunched against obstruction and defeat. He would do something to prevent the waste of Anne. He would find Anne a place where that rare fineness would not be quite wasted in the mechanical routine of mercenary ambition. At least he could do that.
Anne quivering with hurt of ugliness, seeing the bay at night, the jewel-like islands, the stately white ferry boats, clinging to them for people she had never known! He would find a place for Anne and see her in it before he went out into the fullness of the future waiting for him. The possibility of Anne's engagement to a worthless man, Roger had finally to push aside, with reluctant concession to his own ideal of her. If Anne were engaged, the man would have to be worth while.
For a day and a half Roger sought a place for Anne. His own mail remained unopened, telephone messages unanswered. About twelve o'clock on the morning of the second day he found what he wanted. It was with a publishing firm and the duties involved a wider scope than the usual stenography. The surroundings were as pleasant as any office could offer, the hours easy, the firm established, conservative to a degree that had always rasped Roger's youthful enthusiasm, but satisfied him when he visioned the two white-haired, old-fashioned gentlemen as Anne's employers. At the end of half an hour he had forced the salary up five dollars a month and secured an option on the opening for two days.
From old Morrison he got Anne's address, and ten minutes later so astonished Hilda by his insistence that he must know Anne's whereabouts, that she forgot the definite orders to tell no one and described the Saunders home at Quincy so minutely that Roger could have found it blindfolded in the dark.