The room was full of girls similarly employed, ten to thirty cents being the average of their expenditure; all real workers, none of them the fancy stenographers that their employers frequently take out to little lunches at the smarter restaurants at safe distance from their wives up town. They were not a very attractive crowd—thin, flat-chested, and often anæmic, occasionally with pretty faces, hair, or eyes; but work, daily work, had left its impress on them all. Some (their luncheon bills did not exceed ten cents) looked, with their thin fingers and arms, like human attachments to typewriting machines. There was a something not in the least mannish, but still not appealingly womanly, in these self-reliant, quiet business beings. Was it a sort of neuter gender, a sexless being that was there in course of development? Somehow, they did not strike one as beings who would bear and suckle and nurse children. Was this severe struggle and necessity of existence to eliminate the supreme joy of motherhood from their lives?
Back to the office, where they joined their fellow men-workers; they were just fellow-workers, no quarter given or looked for in the failure to do their work. Some of them earned fine salaries, yet there seemed a limit-point—thus far and no farther—men were always in the highest positions. Put it down to tenacity of possession, jealousy, prejudice—anything but want of perseverance, circumspection, industry: the obviousness of the fact remains.
Until half-past five her work goes on just the same as before lunch, and then up town on the elevator. Dry snow is spotting the swirling wind that eddies round the corners; the sidewalks are thick with hurrying people; the elevator is packed to the platforms with men and women tightly crushed together, worse even than coming down. She dines at a little Italian restaurant, where the proprietor, his wife, and children personally attend on their customers; it is known only to a few who mostly know each other—constant habitués—magazine writers and magazine artists, and miscellaneous, but interesting, nondescripts; and her dinner, with Italian wine included, costs forty cents. It is the pleasantest part of the day for her—men and women of that little writing, artistic, thoughtful, and, in a way, thoughtless set she had known for years; men who could never boom themselves or others, or keep up a bluff even enough to advertise themselves; the slow steps of actual merit made their progress seem like marking time. Ruggles, commonly known to his friends as Rembrandt, saw her home—old Ruggles, who painted better pictures than half the foreigners who came to New York, but who would never be a prophet in his own country. Nice old boy, Ruggles; but the fire was burning low in him, its only fuel being the ashes of disappointment.
The sky had cleared, and the moon shone out on the glorious old square, and red lights suggestive of old port and big wood fires streaked the silent snow from the windows. "Bully, isn't it?" And the silent pressure of her arm was affirmative of complete understanding. Her tiny sitting-room was warm; the cheap eastern rugs and dark green background of the walls and some clever original sketches, all were in the harmony of taste that loved restfulness. She lit the gas-stove of imitation logs; Ruggles wheeled a chair in front of it and filled his pipe; from his match she glowed a cigarette, and with a great sigh of relief and tiredness lay back on the sofa.
Then they chatted chum-like of many things. She was doing well—doing a man's work and getting a man's pay, supporting her mother and the two younger girls in the country. It was a strain; but is not successful effort Brian L'Estrange's definition of happiness? So they chatted on until it was time for Ruggles to go.
"Thank you so much for coming, dear old Ruggles; it is so lonely when I come back here by myself."
"Why don't you get married?"
"Ah! I don't know. Perhaps I'm getting old working, and the men I would like to marry don't care for me, and those that would I don't like. I don't think I want really to marry any one, either."
As he shook hands at the door he said, "You ought to get married, girlie. What a good, and true, and beautiful mother you would make for a boy-child!"
The shooting of the door-hasp seemed to let go the flood-gates of her heart. There was the great longing of her heart—to bear a boy-child. "For joy that a man is born into the world" seemed vaguely ringing in her ears. Like a deep-down spring surface-seeking, that old desire welled up, the perfect reward and crown of valiant womanhood—and she felt how good and tender and true a mother she could be; and as the desolation of denial flooded her soul she threw herself on that sofa made of empty cases, held the cushions to her, and cried—cried as if her heart would break.