Mary looked at her with some surprise. Miss Percival did not usually produce opinions of this sort; something must have upset her. Here was this attitude of resentment again! First her daughter and then her secretary! Really, the poor puzzled lady felt, it almost looked as if men must be dreadful people.
In the meanwhile she turned her attention to Miss Percival, who was reporting on two girls whom Mary had sent to the seaside because they showed a tendency to consumption. They were getting along very nicely at the seaside, but the doctor did not think they ought to go back to the tea-shop.
"Not even if we provided them with thicker things to go home in?"
Miss Percival allowed that it might make a difference, but one would have to go on supplying the thicker things for the rest of their lives. And meanwhile more and more girls would be wanting them.
It looked a little as if Miss Percival were in a bad temper that day.
Nevertheless her argument was sound, and Mary knew it. The girls couldn't have afforded proper clothes even if they had kept all their wages for themselves, and most of them didn't. Not what Mary would call proper clothes—women's garments are apt to be so shoddy nowadays.
The truth was, they ought to have higher wages. But then it was quite possible that the business couldn't afford it. Those pretty tea-shops were expensive to decorate, and expensive to keep up. Of course, it paid to have them pretty, because customers preferred them to other tea-shops. Mary supposed that it wouldn't be possible to get the whole trade to agree not to spend so much on decoration. Probably some of the employers didn't care two pins about their girls' wages. They were men, they didn't understand. And now the big drapers were all starting tea-rooms, and taking away custom.
If James could have afforded higher wages he would probably have given them. But—she felt her way to it slowly—that didn't relieve her from the duty of finding out. James had admitted that he didn't know as much about the girls as he would have liked when he set her to make inquiries. After all, even James was a man.
[CHAPTER X]
EVEN when she had made up her mind to speak to James, Mary did not find it easy to do so. She believed that she had long ago put aside, estimating it at its right trivial value, James's reception of her last efforts to discuss the subject. It would be ridiculous, unkind, to store up such slight evidence. But she found now that the incident seemed to have left behind it a permanent unwillingness to run any risk of its repetition—an inclination to let sleeping dogs lie. It was as if she feared something, like a ghost, in which she did not believe.