"I could drown in enthusiasm, genuine, hysterical enthusiasm over anything that would save me from school teaching. If it gave me enough salary to move mummy to the city and make it an eternal impossibility for her ever to ask Tom and Elsie to stay five minutes, I'd drop dead of sheer exuberance."
"Under that condition I may not speak to Thompson. But if you promise to continue in this life I'll see him the first thing in the morning and let you know by afternoon. I'm not sure what it is. You may have to do Household Hints or Beauty articles or Society notes. You may develop into the greatest Lady Teazle of the United States and have the New York papers sending for you."
"Then, when my biography is written you'll be mentioned as having given me my 'first chance.'"
"Is that the only capacity in which I figure in your life?" Under the banter Herrick's eyes looked deep into hers. Jean blushed.
Again, when he left her, Herrick kissed her. This time her repulsion was less. Jean was poignantly ashamed that it was there at all. To the dead black and white of Jean's logic there was something wrong in feeling as near as she felt to Herrick, and at the same time sensing that slight inner revulsion at the touch of his lips on hers.
CHAPTER NINE
Thompson of the Chronicle was a large, fat man who had cultivated what he considered the proper editorial manner so that even in ordinary conversation he snapped out his sentences as if he were ordering a cub reporter to a fire. He prided himself on being able to do a dozen things at once and his fetish was concentration. One gathered that he could write a better article in a power house than in a library. When Jean entered he was scanning the proofs of the week's edition, making notes on a pad, smoking, and calling three numbers on the telephone. Jean's nerves had worn her almost to the point of interrupting the great man, before he glanced at her.
"I'm going to run a new feature. I want a series of interviews with leading people who are doing things. I don't give a whoop what they do so long as it's for the general good, 'our city,' 'civic betterment,' etc. But I don't want slush. No sob-sister rot. Civic pride and that dope. Herrick says you can do it. The first will be with Dr. Mary Mac Lean. We've run her regularly about every six months since Settlements got popular. You're to get a new angle. When you get the hang of it, you'll have to find your own interviews."
He almost snarled the last word, glared at Jean as if she had taken his time on a personal matter, and attacked his cigar as if he hadn't had one for fifty years. Jean had never heard of Dr. Mary Mac Lean and had no very clear idea of what a Settlement was, but she did not ask. When she had gone, the Managing Editor made a hieroglyphic in his memorandum, favorable to Jean.
As she sat waiting for Dr. Mary, Jean's courage came back. At the worst the doctor could only refuse to talk to her, in which case she would have to do the best she could.