“She won’t do,” he said to Graves. “She tries, but she’s—well, I don’t know just what the trouble is. She’s simply not on the job.”
“I’ll have a talk with her,” said Graves. “I’ll see if I can find out what’s wrong.”
III
I saw Miss Clare going into Graves’s office, and I felt sorry for him. I shouldn’t have enjoyed pointing out her faults to her. She was very young and quite without affectation, but she had a natural and altogether charming dignity about her. You couldn’t think of her as an office worker; you were obliged to remember all the time that she was a woman.
She came out after half an hour, looking downcast and grave. She smiled at me, as she passed, with the air of a lady who never neglects her social obligations, but I fancied her lips quivered a trifle.
“Poor girl!” I thought. “She’s out of place here. She hasn’t the stuff in her for a competitive worker. She’ll never get on!”
I was so sympathetic to Graves that he told me the story of the interview.
“The poor girl’s worried sick,” he said. “It seems she’s trying to support her mother, and she’s so desperately afraid she won’t make good that she can’t do her[Pg 84] work. She does try, you know, and she’s fairly accurate, but she’s slow, and she knows it. She said she’d never tried to hurry before, and when she does, she gets nervous.” He paused, and frowned a little. “Well,” he said, “it’s irregular, but I think it’ll work. I’m going to let her come half an hour earlier than the other girls and stay an hour later, so that she can finish her share of the work.”
“That’s hard on her, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Not so hard as getting fired,” he answered. “She’s got a queer point of view about that. She says that if she were discharged, she’d be so discouraged that she’d—I think she said she’d go to pieces.”