"She makes me sick!" he answered, angrily. "There she goes and gets me interested in the game and all, and then she drops it. Why, you know, she promised me at the start she’d train me good and I could go in a tournament. She said she’d introduce me as a friend of hers. She said I was built to be a first-class player, and maybe I’d get to be a perfessional."
"Don’t believe everything she’ll be telling you!" said the cook.
"Damn old fool!" he muttered.
Annie reproved him.
"You’ve got no right to speak like that about a lady," she said.
"Shut up!" he said briefly.
"Go along with you!" cried the cook. "She’ll be waiting."
"Leave her wait! She makes me wait enough. If she don’t like waiting for me, leave her say so. I can get plenty of jobs—better than this one, too. I don’t have to put up with nothing from her!"
II
It was only half-past eight, and Angelica didn’t know what to do with herself. She was in a rebellious and malicious mood; she had been fired by Courtland’s attitude, and she, too, wished to keep some rich person waiting. It was the attitude which is the despair of employers—the spirit in which the young workman comes sauntering in, insolently late, not because he wishes to lose his job or because he is, as they put it, looking for trouble, but because, for this one day, this one hour, he must assert himself, must be a man, must delude himself that he is not inferior, not helpless, not driven.