“Do you really need one?”
“Do I? Well, rather. I had one of the best, but her mother is ill and she may not be able to return to me for months. You’ll have tons of letters to write.”
“So much the better, for I couldn’t live on even your charity.”
“Charity? When my only chance to have an intimate friend is in a secretary, I am so rushed? I’m companionless, but life is frantically interesting.”
And if Julia found herself unable to reach this pitch of enthusiasm, she certainly found the new book of life offered for her daily reading quite absorbing enough to fill her time and thoughts. Her clerical hours were short. The rest of the day, and often during half the night, she was seeing all the problems at first hand. She went daily with Bridgit to the East Side and saw poverty outside of books; poverty, unthinkable, criminal, fleshless, stinking. At night she dreamed that all the babies in the world were wailing for food, all the mothers were emaciated, with eyes of bitter resignation, all the little girls pinched and old and hard. Herded misery, hopeless filth, black despair. Julia was quite unable to recall the reverse side of the picture, in which many were healthy in spite of poverty, and cheerful if only because temperament is stronger than circumstance. She hoped that some day she should fully wake up and burn with a zeal as great as Bridgit’s, but now her brain was tired, and, had she but known it, she protested against living for others until she had lived for herself first. Quite as unconsciously her mind was made up to live her Eastern romance the moment she was free. She heard not a word from France, but guessed the truth; he had forgotten her. If this were the case, however, it might mean that at any moment he would be a dangerous lunatic, and she felt that the duke should be warned. As this was a delicate task, and as her uneasiness grew, she finally, on Bridgit’s advice, wrote to his firm of solicitors. Solicitors are probably the most conservative members of conservative England; but full of duty withal. The junior member found himself overtaken by a storm near White Lodge and craved hospitality of his patron’s distinguished kinsman. France, either because suspicion was still active in a brain not clouded, but blazing with a light unknown to common mortals, or because he happened to be in a good humor, had never appeared to better advantage. The solicitor returned to London so inflamed with indignation that the letter he wrote to Julia breathed his contempt for her entire sex. Julia shrugged her shoulders and dismissed the matter from her mind. Let them work out their own destinies.
When she was not haunting the slums, she was attending meetings: Fabian, labor, working-women, coöperators’, old and new suffrage; at all of which the eternal problem of poverty was the main topic of discussion. She was also taken to visit the slaughter-houses, where the ignorance and savagery of the women employed was primeval. She visited the textile factories of the north, where the work of women and children at the loom was relieved only by alternate hours of drudgery in the home, and where there seemed no object in living whatever. The pit-brow women, at least, had developed the strength and endurance of men, and no doubt would have proved equally efficient in war.
Manchester was a very hot bed of social reform, and Julia was shown all the horrors to which reform owed its concept. She wondered increasingly at the frail fabric of aristocracy and wealth that tottered on its heaving foundations, and conceived some measure of respect for its cleverness.
This drastic experience was enlivened now and again by glimpses of Ishbel, still the merriest, and now the happiest, of mortals. The lines of fatigue and anxiety had disappeared, she was once more the prettiest woman in London, and she needed but the halo of her future position as Countess of Dark to make good people wonder how they could have forgotten it. Julia thought her the most fortunate of women, if only because she was realizing all the romantic dreams of her girlhood on the bogs. Dark was handsome, clever, kind, almost unselfish. He was profoundly in love and he had a very decent income. Above all he had the most romantic title in the British peerage—Earl of Dark! No wonder those fluttering moths of American girls wanted titles. Such a one would make the dullest man in England look romantic to yearning republican eyes, when even an Ishbel was enchanted at the prospect of owning it.
“And yet I am the most practical of mortals—the half of me!” she said gayly, one day, as they sat in the boudoir over the shop, drinking tea unseasoned with reform. “Odd and modern combination!”
“But you’ll give up the shop?”