“Certainly I write at night. And I go home as other business people do. I take the car as far as it will take me, then I walk.”
“I shall be frightened—horribly frightened.”
“For a few evenings, but you’ll soon be used to it. You don’t know what a relief it will be to feel free to go about alone. Of course, they’re careful at the office what kind of night-assignments they give women. But I make it a point not to let them think of my sex any more than is absolutely necessary. It’s a poor game to play in the end—to shirk on the plea of sex. I think most of the unpleasant experiences working-women have are due to that folly—dragging their sex into their business.”
Emily felt and looked dismal as she sat at her desk, struggling to put on paper her idea of what the newspaper would want of what she had seen and heard. She wasted so many sheets of paper in trying to begin that she was ashamed to look at the heap they made on the floor beside her. Also, she felt that every one was watching her and secretly laughing at her. After three hours of wretchedness she had produced seven loosely written pages—“enough to fill columns,” she thought, but in reality a scant half-column. “I begin to understand why Miss Farwell looks so mussy,” she said to herself, miserably eyeing her stained hands and wilted dress, and thinking of her hair, fiercely bent upon hanging out and down. She was so nervous that if she had been alone she would have cried.
“It is impossible,” she thought. “I can never do it. I’m of no account. What a weak, foolish creature I am.”
She looked round, with an idea of escaping, to hide herself and never return. But Miss Gresham was between her and the door. Besides, had she not burned her bridges behind her? She simply must, must, must make the fight.
She remembered Marlowe’s story of Cæsar and the pilot—“I can’t more than fail and die,” she groaned, “and if I am to live, I must work.” Then she laughed at herself for taking herself so seriously. She thought of Marlowe—“What would he say if he could see me now?” She went through her list of acquaintances, picturing to herself how each would look and what each would say at sight of her sitting there—a working-girl, begrimed by toil. She thought of Wayland—the contrast between her present position and what it would have been had she married him. Then she recalled the night he seized her and kissed her—her sensation of loathing, how she had taken a bath afterward and had gone to bed in the dark with her neck where he had kissed her smarting like a poisoned sore.
“You take the Madison Avenue car?” Miss Gresham interrupted, startling her so that she leaped in her chair. “We’ll go together and read what you’ve written.”
Miss Gresham went through it without changing expression. At the end she nodded reassuringly. “It’s a fairly good essay. Of course you couldn’t be expected to know the newspaper style.”
And she went on to point out the crudities—how it might have been begun, where there might have been a few lines of description, why certain paragraphs were too stilted, “too much like magazine literature.” She gave Emily a long slip of paper on which was about a newspaper column of print. “Here’s a proof of my story. I wrote it before dinner and it was set up early. Of course, it’s not a model. But after you leave me you can read it over, and perhaps it may give you some points. Then you might try—not to-night, but to-morrow morning—to write your story again. That’s the easiest and quickest way to catch on.”