He paused for response from her. None came.
"You admit you are a failure?" he said sharply.
"Yes," said she.
"You must have realized it several years ago," he went on. "Instead of allowing your mother to keep on wasting money in entertaining lavishly here to give you a chance to marry, you should have been preparing yourself to earn a living." A pause. "Isn't that true, miss?"
He had a way of pronouncing the word "miss" that made it an epithet, a sneer at her unmarried and unmarriageable state. She colored, paled, murmured:
"Yes."
"Then, better late than never. You'll do well to follow my advice and go to New York and look about you."
"I'll—I'll think of it," stammered she.
And she did think of it. But in all her life she had never considered the idea of money-making. That was something for men, and for the middle and lower classes—while Hanging Rock was regarded as most noisomely middle class by fashionable people, it did not so regard itself. Money-making was not for ladies. Like all her class, she was a constant and a severe critic of the women of the lower orders who worked for her as milliners, dressmakers, shop-attendants, cooks, maids. But, as she now realized, it is one thing to pass upon the work of others; it is another thing to do work oneself. She— There was literally nothing that she could do. Any occupation, even the most menial, was either beyond her skill or beyond her strength, or beyond both.
Suddenly she recalled that she could sing. Her prostrate spirit suddenly leaped erect. Yes, she could sing! Her voice had been praised by experts. Her singing had been in demand at charity entertainments where amateurs had to compete with professionals. Then down she dropped again. She sang well enough to know how badly she sang—the long and toilsome and expensive training that lay between her and operatic or concert or even music-hall stage. Her voice was fine at times. Again—most of the time—it was unreliable. No, she could not hope to get paying employment even as a church choir-singer. Miss Dresser who sang in the choir of the Good Shepherd for ten dollars a Sunday, had not nearly so good a voice as she, but it was reliable.