It would be hard to describe how startling, how conspicuous, was her absence. I missed her from rooms, from desks, where she had certainly never been. The wan sunshine made phantoms of her bright head in dim corners. Other and very different voices took on fleeting resemblances to hers. Once I saw the neat, spare form of Miss Kelly taking a drink at the water cooler, and she seemed to melt into the gracious outlines of that lost one.
My conscience troubled me. My heart was heavy. Very long was the day; and at the end of it I secured her address and went off to see her.
Never mind the eloquent speech I had prepared, for I never uttered one word of it. Suffice it to say that I intended to offer Miss Clare a permanent position, with no possibility of being fired.
She lived in an apartment house on a side street uptown on the West Side—a street that was just on the border of a slum—a street of woeful and dismal gentility. I rang the bell, blundered down a black, narrow hall, and would have gone upstairs if a voice behind me hadn’t murmured:
“Clare?”
Turning, I asserted that a Clare was what I sought, and I was bidden to step[Pg 89] through an open door and into a prim little sitting room. It was dismal there, too, but light enough for me to see that I was confronted by a mother out of a book—a gray-haired, delicate little creature with a smile of invincible innocence and good will.
I said that I came from the office to see Miss Clare. Strictly speaking, this was true; but the implication was not, for my business had nothing to do with the office.
“Am sorry ma daughter’s not in,” said Mrs. Clare, in her slurred Southern accent. “If you’d care to wait, Ah don’t think she’ll be long.”
So I sat down, and was instantly fed with tea and cake.
“Rosemary made the cake,” Mrs. Clare explained. “She’s wonderful at baking!”