“Oh, I’m glad I’m here, but I wish it was six months from now.”
“Of course you do. That’s the way we all feel. But you’ll soon swing into place, and be too busy to think. I do wish you could get work in the office, so that you could keep regular hours and meals, and not lose your good looks; but there’s no berth of that sort. I tell you it is a sad day when a girl under twenty-five sees the lines coming. The Revolting Sisterhood say that the next century is to be ours; but I doubt it. Men lighten our burdens a little now, but I’m afraid they’ll hate us if we worry and supplant them any further. Well, I’m going to take a nap. Wake me promptly at 3.10.”
She closed her eyes and fell asleep immediately. The lines grew fainter as she slept, and the hair fell softly about her face. Patience reflected gratefully that three months of absolute leisure and peace of mind would give back to the girl all her freshness and rounded contours. At ten minutes past three she awakened her. Miss Merrien sat up with a sigh.
“I feel better, though. Cultivate those cat-naps. They refresh you wonderfully. Now, we’ll go.”
II
They went down town on the Elevated, leaving it at Park Row. Patience was so much interested in the great irregular mass of buildings surrounding City Hall Square, at the dense throngs packing the crooked side streets, at the fakirs with their nonsensical wares, at the bewildering array of gilt newspaper names on the rows and stories of polished windows, that she forgot her errand for the moment, and was nearly run over.
“Yes, this is the heart of New York, sure enough,” assented Miss Merrien. “All those big buildings over there are on the famous Newspaper Row. Brooklyn Bridge is just behind. This is the Post Office on the right, and that flat building in the square is the City Hall. I tell you when you get down here, the rest of New York, including all the smart folk, seems pretty insignificant.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Patience, with a sudden sinking of the heart, “there is the ‘Day’ building.”
“That is our shop. Now, brace up.”
Patience needed the admonition. She forgot City Hall Park. All her doubts returned, with others in their wake. She knew something of the snobbery of the world. As Mrs. Beverly Peele she had been an object of respectful interest to Mr. Field. What would she be as an applicant for work? True, he had been kind to her when she was a small nobody, but that might have been merely a caprice.