Miss Frazier put a list of Friday’s appointments on Petra’s desk. “This is going to be a crowded day,” she said. “Here they are. The doctor won’t be able to see anybody who’s not down here, unless it is something very special, and you’ll have to decide that. Of course, they’ll all say it is very special. You’ll have to judge in spite of what they say. If you get puzzled, just tell them to telephone again later, or, if it’s somebody calling, keep them until I come out and you can ask me about it. But I think you won’t have to do either of those things. I think you’ll be perfectly able to decide anything that comes up for yourself, Petra.”
“But Janet!” They were Petra and Janet to each other—had been since the second day. “You’re throwing me in and telling me to swim. Suppose I make a mistake?”
“Well, that will be just too bad!” But Janet belied the slangy irony of the words by a quizzical accompanying smile. “It’s the way I myself began,” she said. “And after all, you have had several days now of answering telephones and talking to people here, with me right beside you. I never had any such start. Don’t worry. Just dive in. You’ll be all right. I know it.” The doctor’s buzzer had sounded and she had to hurry away to the inner sanctum.
Petra, who had only just arrived at the office, was a little late. Dick Wilder had slept last night at the Allens’ and offered to drive her into town this morning. He had, however, overslept and been late in coming for her. But that had seemed a feeble explanation when Petra offered it to Janet a minute ago and she hoped now that Doctor Pryne need not know of it. Janet, she felt sure, would not mention it unless he asked. As his door was soundproof, the chances were he did not know whether she had come late or early. He himself had been in there since eight. But she decided to depend only on the trains after this. They were never late. She wanted, with all her soul, to be as scrupulous and perfect as humanly possible in this job.
She went into the dressing room, put her hat on the shelf, powdered her face and held her wrists for a few seconds under the cold-water faucet. The papers had promised a day of record-breaking heat for June, and now, only a little after nine, the thermometer in the dressing-room window, here in the shade, registered eighty-five. Petra was not like Clare—and Shelley—elated and toned up by heat. Hot city days frightened her a little and filled her with an anticipation of some unknown but dreaded eventuality. But now that she had a real and an important job, she must be superior to this idiosyncrasy, must keep her mind clear for action and deny the childish mood.
It was not yet time for the telephone to begin its morning bombardment and she would have leisure for a little study. Getting her shorthand textbook out of its drawer, she drew pencil and paper toward her and prepared for strenuous work. Janet had been “an angel” (Petra’s expression) and constituted herself Petra’s shorthand teacher. She said that there was no reason whatever why Petra, at the end of a year’s work here, shouldn’t be prepared to take dictation from anybody, typewrite rapidly, and have a profession at her finger tips. But during this year of learning, Petra was determined to be worth every dollar that Doctor Pryne paid her. He was not her friend—he never could be now—and it must be a strictly business exchange between them and an honest one.... If you really use your brain, really concentrate, heat—even city heat—is nothing. The human brain, and the will back of it, cut through discomfort like a knife. Well, perhaps that was all that Clare meant, when she always said that hot days exhilarated her. Overcoming the wretchedness of stifling heat, being superior to it, was the exhilaration. Indeed, Petra found herself exhilarated at this moment. It was exhilarating to concentrate on these word-symbols, master them, and be of some account in the world!
But at this moment of full content—for it was content—Petra’s telephone surprisingly buzzed. Her voice—she heard it herself, answering—had an elated ring. But the voice that sounded in reply was no strange voice from the outside. It was Doctor Pryne himself, speaking to her from behind his closed door only a few yards away. He was asking her to have lunch with him at one-thirty at the Copley.
“I’m sorry. I’m lunching with Dick Wilder. I’m afraid I can’t.”
That is all she said and it was uttered with polite deliberateness. But her hand, putting down the telephone, was shaking. And this surprising phenomenon had hardly impressed itself on Petra’s attention before she was aware of the thunderous circulation of her blood.... What had so startled her body! Her employer’s voice, it seemed. But the invitation and her having to refuse it had meant very little to her conscious thinking self. Did the body have a life of its own, then,—fears and delights, even thoughts of its own? It seemed so. But she had first learned it on Saturday afternoon, when Doctor Pryne had lighted her cigarette for her. As he held the match, her body had given her this same surprise then. It had been Doctor Pryne then and it was Doctor Pryne again now. He had more significance to her, it seemed, than she herself knew. But her body knew.... It was instinct of some sort, she supposed. She was remembering one astonishing experience she had had of an animal’s instinct. It occurred the summer she had been sent to camp where there was riding. She and a few others had lost their way on the country roads and had been caught by the dark. Petra was riding ahead, loving the dark and the adventure, when suddenly her horse stopped and she felt him bristling under her. She felt his fear but stubbornly tried to urge him on. Whatever he was afraid of, they must get away from it. She was as frightened as the horse, but her desire was to plunge on and out of the situation—whatever it was. But a wiser and older girl, coming along, dismounted, walked cautiously a few yards ahead and found that a bridge was down over a deep gorge. Petra’s horse could not have seen it. Had the sound of the rushing water proclaimed no bridge above it to his sensitive ears?... But what bridge was down now? Why was her blood thundering like this and her mind at a standstill?