The door closed, she saw him gazing at her; and that look through the bars of the elevator door, haunted her. She had seen it in his face once before, though not so strongly,—when she said good-bye to him as she was going away to Paris. But where else had she seen it? Weeks afterward, when she was talking to Mrs. Parrott of something very different, there suddenly leaped to the surface of her mind a memory—the public square in a mountain town, a man dead upon the stones, another near him, dying and turning his face toward the shelter whence he had come; and in his face the look of farewell to the woman.
“What is it, dear? Are you ill this morning?” asked Mrs. Parrott.
“Not—not very,” answered Emily brokenly, and she vanished into her office and closed its door.
CHAPTER XXIX.
A MAN AND A “PAST.”
HAD Emily and Stilson been idlers or of those workers who look upon work as a curse, they would have taken one of two courses. Either Stilson would have repudiated his obligations and they would have rushed together to hurry on to what would have been for them a moral catastrophe, or they would have remained apart to sink separately into mental and physical ruin. As it was, they worked—steadily, earnestly, using their daily routine of labour to give them strength for the fight against depression and despair.
Stilson, with the tenacity of purpose that made life for him one long battle, fought hopelessly. To him hope seemed always only the delusive foreshadow of oncoming disappointment, a lying messenger sent ahead by fate in cynical mockery of its human prey. And whenever his routine relaxed its compulsion, he laid himself on the rack and tortured himself with memories and with dreams.
Emily was aided by her temperament. She loved life and passionately believed in it. She was mentally incapable of long accepting an adverse decree of destiny as final. But at best it was a wintry light that hope shed—between storms—upon her heart. Her chief source of courage was her ideal of him—the strong, the brave, the inflexible. “Forgive me!” she would say, humbling herself before his image in her mind after her outbursts of protest or her attacks of despondency. “I am not worthy of you. But oh,—I want you—need you—so!”
Within a short time it was apparent that from the professional standpoint she had done well in going to the World of Women. After the newspaper, the magazine seemed play. In the Democrat office she had not been looked upon as extraordinary. Here they regarded her as a person of amazing talent—for a woman. They marvelled at her energy, at her quickness, at her flow of plans for articles and illustrations. And without a hint from her they raised her salary to what she had been getting, besides accepting proposals she made for several articles to be written by herself.
They were especially delighted with her management of “the old lady”—the only name ever given Mrs. Parrott when she was out of hearing. She patronised Emily in a motherly way, and Emily submitted like a dutiful daughter. She accepted Emily’s suggestions as her own. “My dear,” she said one day, “I’m so glad I’ve got you here to help me put my ideas through. I’ve been suggesting and suggesting in vain for years.” And Emily looked grateful and refused to respond to the sly smile from Mr. Burnham who had overheard.
Emily did not under-estimate Mrs. Parrott’s usefulness to her. In thirty years of experience as a writer and an editor, “the old lady” had accumulated much that was of permanent value, as well as a mass of antiquated or antiquating trash. Emily belonged to the advance guard of a generation that had small reverence for the “prim ideals of the past.” Mrs. Parrott knew the “provincial mind,” the magazine-reading mind, better than did Emily—or at least was more respectful of its ideas, more cautious of offending its notions of what it believed or thought it ought to believe. And often when Emily through ignorance or intolerance would have “gone too far” for any but a New York constituency, Mrs. Parrott interposed with a remonstrance or a suggestion which Emily was acute enough to appreciate. She laughed at these “hypocrisies” but—she always had circulation in mind. She liked to startle, but she knew that she must startle in ways that would attract, not frighten away.