Chapter X
While Letty was beginning a new experience Judson Flack was doing his best to carry out his threat. That is to say, he was making the round of the studios in which his step-daughter had occasionally found work, discreetly asking if she had been there that day. It was all he could think of doing. To the best of his knowledge she had no friends with whom she could have taken refuge, though the suspicion crossed his mind that she might have drowned herself to spite him.
As a matter of fact Letty was asking the question if she wasn’t making a mistake in not doing so, either literally or morally. Never before in her life had she been up against this problem of insufficiency. Among the hard things she had known she had not known this; and now that she was involved in it, it seemed to her harder than everything else put together.
In her humble round, bitter as it was, she had always been considered competent. It was the sense of her competence that gave her the self-respect enabling her to bear up. According to her standards she could keep house cleverly, and could make a dollar go as far as other girls made two. When she got her first chance in a studio, through an acquaintance of Judson Flack’s, she didn’t shrink from it, and had more than once been chosen by a director to be that member 110 of a crowd who moves in the front and expresses the crowd psychologically. Had she only had the clothes....
And now she was to have them. As far as that went she was not merely glad; she was one sheer quiver of excitement. It was not the end she shrank from; it was the means. If she could only have had fifty dollars to go “poking round” where she knew that bargains could be found, she might have enjoyed the prospect; but Steptoe could only “take measures” on the grand scale to which he was accustomed.
The grand scale frightened her, chiefly because she was dressed as she was dressed. It was her first thought and her last one. When Steptoe told her the hour at which he had asked Eugene to bring round the car the mere vision of herself stepping into it made her want to sink into the ground. Eugene didn’t live in the house—she had discovered that—and so would bring the stare of another pair of eyes under whose scrutiny she would have to pass. Those of the three women having already scorched her to the bone, she would have to be scorched again.
She tried to say this to Steptoe, as they stood in the drawing-room window waiting for the car; but she didn’t know how to make him understand it. When she tried to put it into words, the right words wouldn’t come. Steptoe had taken as general what she was trying to explain to him in particular.
“It’ll be very important to madam to fyce what’s ’ard, and to do it bryve like. It’ll be the mykin’ of ’er if she can. ’Umble ’ill is pretty stiff to climb; but them as gets to the top of it is tough.”
She thought this over silently. He meant that if she set herself to take humiliations as they came, dragging herself up over them, she would be the stronger for it in the end.