Bread

by Charles G. Norris

Jeannette liked her young boss, principally because it soon became apparent that he treated her with a courtesy he did not accord the other girls. She was, after all, a “lady,” she told herself, straightening her shoulders a trifle, and he was sufficiently well-bred himself to recognize that fact. He must see, of course, the difference between herself and such girls as—well—as Miss Flannigan, for instance. But more than this, Jeannette grew daily more and more convinced that he was beginning to take a personal interest in her for which none of these considerations accounted. Nothing definite between them gave this justification. There was no word, no inflection of voice that had any significance, but she saw it in a quick glimpse of his blue eyes watching her as she sat beside his desk, in the smile of his strange little mouth that stretched itself tightly across his small teeth when he first greeted her in the day and wished her “good-morning.” Some strange thrilling of her pulses beset her as she sat near him. It irritated her; she struggled against it, even rose to her feet and went to her desk upon a manufactured excuse to check the subtle influence that began to steal upon her when she was near him. All her instincts battled against this upsetting something, whatever it was,—she could not identify it by a name—which began more and more to trouble her.

Jeannette was a normal, healthy girl budding into womanhood, with broadening horizons and rapidly increasing intimate associations with the world. She was growing daily more mature, more impressive in her bearing, and notably more beautiful. She was fully conscious of this. Her mirror told her so, the glances of men on the street contributed their evidence, the covert inspection of her own sex both in and out of the office confirmed it. She was becoming aware, too, of a growing self-confidence, of poise and power in herself that she had never suspected.

With what constituted “crushes,” “cases,” with what was implied in saying one was “smitten,” she was thoroughly familiar. To a confidant she would now have frankly described Roy Beardsley as having a “crush” on her. He was not the first youth of whom she could have truthfully said as much. Various boys at one time or another, during her school days, had slipped notes to her as they passed her desk, or shamblingly trailed her home after school, carrying her books for her, and had hung around the doorstep of the apartment house, loitering over their leave-taking, digging the toe of a shoe into the pavement, grinning foolishly. Some of them had confided to her that they “loved” her and asked her to promise to be their “girl.” She, herself, had had a “terrible case” on a vaudeville dancer named Maurice Monteagle, and on a youth of Greek extraction who worked in Bannerman’s Drug Store on the corner near her home, tended the soda-water counter there and whose name she never learned.

But in none of these affairs of her young heart had there been anything like this. She began by being somewhat flattered by Beardsley’s attention, and was guilty of provoking him a little at first with a smile and glance. Like all girls of her age, she had been willing, even anxious, to whip his interest into flame. But she soon grew frightened. There was now something in the air, something in herself she could not quite control; she could not still the sudden throbbing of her heart, the swimming of her senses. The moment came when she actually dreaded meeting him in the mornings, when the minutes she was obliged to sit beside his desk and listen to the peculiar little twang in his voice were an ordeal. She dared not lift her eyes to meet his, but she could see his long white fingers moving about on the desk, playing with pencil and pen, and she could feel him looking at her when his voice fell silent. These were the moments that disturbed her most, when she could not—not for the life of her—control the mounting color that began somewhere deep down within her, and swept up into her cheeks, over her temples, to the roots of her hair. She had to rest her hand against her note-book, to keep it from trembling. During these silences when she felt him studying her she sometimes thought she must scream or do something mad, unless he turned his eyes elsewhere. She seriously considered resigning and seeking another position.

§ 6

Jeannette drank deeply of satisfaction in being a wage-earner. She walked the streets of the city with a buoyant tread; she gazed with pride and affection into the eyes of other working girls she passed; she was self-supporting like them; she had something in common with each and every one of them; there was a great bond that drew them all together.

But while she felt thus affectionately sympathetic to these girls in the mass, no one of them drew the line of social distinction more rigidly, even more cruelly than did she, herself. She felt she was the superior of the vast majority of them, and the equal of the best. She might not be earning the salary perhaps some of them did who were private secretaries, but she was confident that she would. Her experience with stenography confirmed this self-confidence. With three weeks of actual practice the trick, the knack, the knowledge,—whatever it was,—had come to her of a sudden. Now she could sweep her pencil across the page of her note-book, leaving in its wake an easy string of curves, dots and dashes, setting them down automatically, keeping pace with even the swiftest of young Beardsley’s sentences. Nothing could stop her progress in the business world; she loved being of it, revelled in its atmosphere, realizing that she was cleverer than most men, shrewder, quicker, with the additional advantage of unerring intuition.

This new-born ambition told her to keep herself aloof from other working girls. Not that she had any inclination to associate with them; they offended her,—not only those in the office but the giggling, simpering girls she saw on the street, who were obviously of the same class, teetering along on ridiculously high heels, wearing imitation furs, and building their hair into enormous bulging pompadours. They were the kind who did not leave the offices where they worked at the noon hour but gathered in groups to eat their lunches out of cardboard boxes and left a litter of crumbs on the floor; they were the kind who crowded Childs’ restaurant, adding their shrill voices and shrieks to the deafening clatter of banging crockery.

Jeannette, feeling that it was a working girl’s privilege to become an habitué of Childs’, eagerly entered one of these restaurants at a noon hour during the early days of her employment. Accustomed as she had become to the din of an office, the noise in the eating place did not distress her. But she shrank from rubbing elbows with neighbors whose manner of feeding themselves horrified her. A study of the price card and an estimate of what she could buy for fifteen cents, the amount she decided she might properly allow herself for lunches, completed her dissatisfaction with the restaurant and similar places. She decided to go without lunch and to spend the leisure time of her noon-hour wandering up and down Fifth Avenue and Broadway, looking into shop windows,—- Lord & Taylor’s, Arnold Constable’s and even Tiffany’s on Union Square,—and in making tours of inspection through the aisles of Siegel-Cooper’s mammoth establishment on Sixth Avenue.

It was in the rotunda of this gigantic store, where stood a great golden symbolic figure of a laurel-crowned woman, that there was a large circular candy counter and soda fountain, and here the girl discovered one might get coffee, creamed and sugared, and served in a neat little flowered china cup, and two saltine crackers on the edge of the saucer, for a nickel. In time, this came to constitute her daily lunch. She could stand at the counter, sipping her drink, and nibbling the crackers at her ease, feeling inconspicuous and comfortable, presenting, she realized, merely the appearance of a lady shopper, who had taken a moment from her purchasing for a bit of refreshment.