“It isn’t how other people treat us so much as how we treat ourselves that matters,” she said quietly, making a wry face at the dust and dirt on the instrument table, which threatened to leave ugly marks on her clean blouse.
“What do you mean?” he asked, with an offended air which would have made her laugh again but for the hollow cough which accompanied it, and that woke her pity instead.
“My father used to say that if we always respected ourselves, and were careful never to do anything we were ashamed of, other people would respect us too,” Nell said softly.
“It is about time I was going, I expect,” the boy remarked stiffly, and with his head held rather high. She did not even guess how acutely those words of hers had struck home.
Nell soon had to find that, although there was not so much telegraphy to be done at Camp’s Gulch as at Bratley, the post was decidedly not a sinecure.
Before the train had been gone half an hour, old Joey Trip came in gently apologetic to know if she could lend him a hand in moving some sacks in the big store.
Out went Nell with the brisk willingness which she always displayed in helping other people. But a brief ten minutes showed her that it was not she who helped Joey, so much as she who did the work with a little help from him.
He had no bodily strength, poor old fellow, although his spirit and energy were as great as ever. But Nell was strong, so she pushed, pulled, and hustled the bags into their place; then went off back to her office, leaving the old man quite happy in the belief that he had done all the work, with just a little help from the new young lady clerk.
The view from her office window showed a steep mountain-side with a white line of road peeping out here and there where the trees thinned out. This was the main road away from the depot; but there were others, some branching from this one, and others leading away on every side into the heart of the hilly wilderness.
It was a very lonely life upon which Nell had entered; she had no society at all, saving old Mrs. Trip and her husband. A few women did occasionally come to the depot from the mining villages, but they were a sorry-looking lot for the most part, and she felt no desire to have any acquaintance with them.