“Perhaps,” she admitted.
“Oh-h,—is that so?” mimicked Miss Flannigan. “Well, you got another think coming,—didn’t you?”
Jeannette drowned the words by attacking her machine, her fingers flying, the warning ping of the tiny bell sounding at half-minute intervals. But her heart was lead within her, and her throat tightened convulsively. She was going to lose her job! She was going to be thrown out of work! She was going to be among the unemployed again! Her mother! ... And Alice! ... That precious five dollars a week that was all her own!
The rest of the day was dreary, interminable. Demoralization was in the air. The girls whispered openly among themselves, and filtered by twos and threes to the dressing-room, where they congregated and gossiped. The spring sunshine grew stale, and poured brazenly through the west windows. Miss Flannigan chewed gum incessantly as she giggled noisily over confidences with a neighbor. Even Beardsley seemed to have lost interest for Jeannette.
Yet when she came to his desk later in the day for the usual dictation, he handed her a paper on which he had written:
“You mustn’t be downhearted. There is always a demand for good stenographers. You won’t have the slightest difficulty in getting another job. I wish I was as sure of one myself. May I walk home with you this evening?”
She gave him no definite answer but she liked him for his encouragement and sympathy. Whenever she sat near his desk, note-book in hand, waiting for him to dictate to her, he was to her a superior being, one whose judgment and perception were above her own; he was her “boss.” It was different when she met him outside the office; he was just a boy then,—a boy who had flunked out of college. Now he, too, had lost his job. Like her, he would soon be unemployed. No longer need she fear his possible censure of her work, or take pleasure in his praise of it. She realized he had lost weight with her.
After office hours that evening, he met her outside the building and as he walked home with her was full of philosophical counsel.
“Why, Miss Sturgis, it’s never hard for a girl to get a job, —a,girl who’s got a profession, and who’s shown herself to be a first-rate stenographer. The offices downtown are just crazy to get hold of girls like you. You won’t have the slightest difficulty in finding another position.... If you were me, you’d have something to worry about. I’ve got to get a job that will land me somewhere,—a job in which I can rise to something better.”
“But so have I,” said Jeannette.