“I thought you American women preferred the other side.”
“Oh, a few of us do—those who aren’t happy unless they have somebody bowing and scraping to them or are bowing and scraping to somebody. You know, the poor we have always with us—the poor in spirit as well as the other kind of poor.”
Before they had talked an hour Frothingham felt that the outlook for his campaign in the Barney house was not promising. Nelly was frank and friendly, and he saw that she liked him. But there was something in her atmosphere which made him know that she cared little for the things which were everything to him and which must be everything to the woman he might hope to win. He feared that she was not for him. “She ain’t in my class—or perhaps I’d better say, I ain’t in hers.”
When Wickham came, at half-past ten, she left them. After suppressing yawns for fifteen minutes he said: “I’m off to bed. I was at a dance last night and owe myself five hours sleep. You see, father and I get up at half-past six. We have to be at the store at eight.”
At the store! At eight! “And he hasn’t in the least the look of that sort of chap,” thought Frothingham. As for rising at half-past six, one might do it to hunt or shoot. But to do it morning after morning “merely to set a lot of bounders to selling a lot of cloth”—preposterous!
XVII
AFTER a few days of Chicago Frothingham felt utterly out of place. There were no idlers, no idling places. To idle meant to sit in lonely boredom.
Barney and his son were busy all day—they grudged the half-hour of that precious time of theirs which they spent at luncheon. Nelly, too, had her work—some sort of a school she was running, away off somewhere in the poorer part of the town. He was sensitive enough soon to discover, in spite of her courtesy, that he was interrupting her routine seriously and was in the way to becoming a burden. He saw as much of her as he dared—she had for him a charm that became the more difficult to resist as his hope of winning her decreased. He relieved her of himself during her busy hours so tactfully that she did not suspect him of penetrating what she honestly tried to conceal.