“I could take in paying guests. We have several spare rooms. I never expected to come to that but I’d do it and pay you more rent.”
“It isn’t so much a matter of income——” And then she rose with a sigh of relief. A girl was coming down the stairs, and she looked as unlike her presumable mother as possible.
Mrs. Pelham stood up. “My daughter, Mrs. Brewster—Miss Carteret,” she said in her stiff precise manner. “I hope you will excuse me for a few moments.” And she hastily left the room.
“ ‘Mrs.!’ ” said Gita, smiling once more as she resumed her seat on a chair as hard as any at Carteret Manor. “I was sure you were a girl like myself.”
“I am only twenty-six, and I’m a widow. My husband died a few months after our marriage. But that seems a long time ago—I was just twenty. I hear this is your first visit East. I hope you like it.”
And they exchanged easy commonplaces on the fertile subject of the Boardwalk and Atlantic City.
Mrs. Brewster was as slim as Gita and hardly as tall. She, also, held herself erectly, but without stiffness; her dark blue frock was of excellent material fashionably cut; and, observed Gita, who had an eye for clothes, singular in one who disdained them, as well “put on” as Polly’s. Her brown hair was cut short and brushed back from a brow of unfashionable nobility, and her large light eyes were both intelligent and humorous. Gita thought she had never seen a more emphatic little nose nor a more determined chin. If she had ever suffered she bore no trace and looked as if her vision would always be set toward the future in confidence and hope.
As the conversation became more personal Gita learned that Mrs. Brewster was buyer for one of the department stores on Atlantic Avenue, a position that took her frequently to Philadelphia and New York. She felt slightly bewildered. It was her first acquaintance with a girl of the business class, and she had assumed vaguely that all members of that order were hard and common. She had once dreaded a similar fate, and although, she told herself, she could not be harder, she had wondered if she would wholly forget the anxious training and admonitions of her mother. But Millicent might have had the bringing-up of Elsie Brewster. Gita wondered if she were a snob and felt secretly humiliated.
“But you don’t like work?” she asked, determined to get to the root of the matter. “You—you look, rather, as if you were both a student and fond of a good time like other girls. Once I thought I should have to go to work, and, frankly, I hated the bare idea.”
Mrs. Brewster smiled. “If you have to do a thing it is better to like it than hate it, don’t you think? But you are rather shrewd, you know. As a matter of fact I am fond of reading and study, and my job leaves me a good many hours of leisure. I also love good times, of course, but when you have a certain object in life——” Her voice faltered and she blushed and glanced hesitatingly at this odd visitor who looked like a boy with an eager girl’s face, and whom she had thought at first she should find detestable. But Miss Carteret was not in the least like other masculine women she had met, and when she forgot to be hard and crisp her voice had deep warm notes that were as attractive an anomaly as those long black eyelashes under that awful sailor hat.