Twelve o’clock came.
“You’re a stranger here,” said Mr. Petersen, “perhaps you don’t know where to go for lunch. If you’d do me the honour, this first day——”
She was not quite sure what was the proper course for a business woman, but she knew that Mr. Petersen was absolutely “all right,” and to be trusted, so she accepted, and went up the street to the Eagle House with him.
The Eagle House was a fly-blown and extraordinarily dingy hotel patronised by travelling salesmen; the food was horrible but the atmosphere impeccably respectable. Frances was delighted with it. Never before had she felt so adult, so independent. She was sure that Mr. Petersen took her seriously, judged her upon her merits as an individual and not as a Defoe or as a young girl—not as a female at all. She liked him! She remembered what Minnie had said about him and rejected it all. “Common,” “presumptuous,” “thick-skinned”; snobbish nonsense, all that!
They walked back to the office and spent a very agreeable afternoon there. He explained the work to her, and was pleased by the quickness with which she grasped his explanations. He saw that she would soon be really very useful. She was not only intelligent and ambitious, but she had that remarkable feminine loyalty, that willingness to use all her powers in behalf of some one else, that is the curse and the glory of her sex. She never viewed Mr. Petersen as an ambitious young man would have done, as a stepping stone in her own career; she was genuinely concerned with how she could help Mr. Petersen with Mr. Petersen’s business.
Five o’clock came very soon, she thought. Mr. Petersen looked at the clock and closed his desk.
“Closing time!” he said cheerfully, “I hope your first day in business hasn’t——”
He stopped short because her face had changed so suddenly. She turned pale as he was speaking.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, anxiously. “Are you ill?”