It was a remark she often made—to give him the opportunity to say, "I've thought of little else, I'm sorry to say—I, who have a career to look after." He made the usual answer, and they smiled happily at each other. "And you?" he said.
"Oh, I? What else has a woman to think about?"
Her statement was as true as his was false. He was indeed all she had to think about—all worth wasting the effort of thought upon. But he—though he did not realize it—had thought of her only in the incidental way in which an ambition-possessed man must force himself to think of a woman. The best of his mind was commandeered to his career. An amiable but shakily founded theory that it was "our" career enabled him to say without sense of lying that his chief thought had been she.
"How those men down town would poke fun at you," said she, "if they knew you had me with you all the time, right beside you."
This amused him. "Still, I suspect there are lots of men who'd be exposed in the same way if there were a general and complete show-down."
"Sometimes I wish I really were with you—working with you—helping you. You have girls—a girl—to be your secretary—or whatever you call it—don't you?"
"You should have seen the one I had to-day. But there's always something pathetic about every girl who has to make her own living."
"Pathetic!" protested Miss Burroughs. "Not at all. I think it's fine."
"You wouldn't say that if you had tried it."
"Indeed, I should," she declared with spirit. "You men are entirely too soft about women. You don't realize how strong they are. And, of course, women don't resist the temptation to use their sex when they see how easy it is to fool men that way. The sad thing about it is that the woman who gets along by using her sex and by appealing to the soft-heartedness of men never learns to rely on herself. She's likely to come to grief sooner or later."