"I believe so—yes."
"I think, my dear, you ought to sacrifice some of yours. You have so much of it, and it seems to tire you."
"But I haven't got a fever!" she protested. Under her shadowed eyes the nerves were twitching. She wished he would not discuss her; she wanted to forget her own existence.
"No, you're too pale for that," he agreed, gazing at her so earnestly that she laughed. He raised his brows. "I don't know why you are amused, my dear, but I know the mountains would make you strong. And you've always wanted to go there. Why won't you?"
She could not tell him the whole truth. She could not say: "I thought so wickedly of you and the woman there that I cannot face you both together. And the mountains would frown on me in anger and frighten me. I must wait till I'm forgiven." She told part of the truth.
"I've to learn to earn my own living, and I must begin. And, besides, I never did like Alexander. If he wasn't going to be there——"
"I don't want to press it," he said, and left her a little disappointed that he had not pursued the subject.
Edward Webb went to the hills, and she began her training as a secretarial clerk. For the sum of five pounds Blister's Commercial Academy undertook to fit her for the work, and find a situation for her afterwards. She did not like the large condescension of Mr. Blister—preferably called "The Professor," and, by jocular spirits, the "Mayor and Corporation"—but she knew she could learn anything he could teach her, and she tried not to allow her feminine conception of him to prejudice her against his instruction, tried to be so impersonal as not to shrink when he stooped over her shorthand, looking, and sometimes, alas! even feeling, like a large and clever whale.
Her fellow-students, youths as well as women, were to her a new race, drawn as if by some common inheritance to these inky labours. The youths were for the most part genuinely young, but the women were of all ages. There were girls of fourteen, pert or simpering, with premature glances for the dusty, doubtfully collared young men; there were young women with the independence of their generation, and scorn or frank comradeship for men; their glances were straight and piercing, painful to the undeveloped male, wishing to be paramount. There were older women, jerked into the necessity of earning bread, with the sheltered look still on them, and an air of injured or shy surprise at Fortune's hardy ways, and elderly women, making a last effort to cheat Fate. While she worked there, these people were of an absorbing interest to Theresa, but like all, save the most foolish of them, she soon passed out of the Academy, and, as she went, they fell back into the less active places of her mind; and it was strange, yet, in some way, pleasing to think that she, too, made one of a crowd of half-remembered fellow-creatures, with her own tiny but irrebuttable influence on some one's conception of life.
For farewell, the Professor embedded her hand in his.