Whenever she felt my gaze, she would lift her eyes and smile at me across the table. I waited for this smile. A certain light in her soft brown eyes has never failed to fascinate me.
Whenever Miss Marsh dropped in, I would let my wife entertain her. I would smoke my pipe and read to myself. Miss Marsh got on my nerves. She was from the South; had seen better days, but was now clerking in a dry-goods store on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street. She was a thin, little old maid, who tried to be girlish. She laughed and gushed a good deal, and dyed her hair and painted her face. But my wife, who is kind to everyone, always defended her.
“Poor little thing! If she didn’t try to keep up her spirits and look as young as possible, she’d lose her position in the store. And she does say some sharp, bright things. She leads a lonely life. And I don’t believe she has enough to eat.”
I can tell these things now about Miss Marsh; for later she and I came to understand each other better.
I worked in a downtown printing-plant. It was an old established concern, and I had worked there for years. I had been foreman in one of the departments until they put in a younger man. When the old proprietor died, and his son stepped into the father’s shoes, a good many changes were made. The son was a modern efficiency man.
It cut pretty deeply into my pride to be shifted around from one job to another-each a little inferior to the former and commanding less pay-and then being always finally misplaced by a younger man. But I swallowed it all and stayed on. I knew that jobs were not lying around loose for men of my years. My long experience mended a good many blunders made by the younger chaps in the plant. They acknowledged it, too, whenever I jokingly told them. But at the same time they smiled indulgence of “old Pop,” as they all called me.
I took this title goodnaturedly, but something in me always shrank from it a little. It was from the patronage of youth that I shrank-a patronage just tinged with contempt for my years. But I shrank more from their pity the day that I finally got my discharge. And they did pity me, for they all liked me. I know that my sense of humor made me popular with them.
The discharge came unexpectedly, though I had been fearing and dreading it for a long time. This fear and dread had begun to look out of my eyes. I caught it sometimes in the mirror, and felt a pride of resentment against it, as something that hurt my self-respect. But what hurt me worse was the knowledge that my wife saw it, too. I shrank sensitively from any depreciation of myself in her feelings. My masculine pride wanted to keep her always impressed with my strength.
She never said anything; but at times I could feel her anxiously watching me. There was a sympathetic encouragement in her smile, and in the press of her hand on my arm after she had kissed me good-bye when I was starting to work in the morning. I always met this smile with one of whimsical reassurance. But we both had the feeling of bluffing some menacing calamity. And when I walked away, my shoulders drooped under this cringing new self-consciousness, and my feet shuffled heavily. I had always walked upright and with a spring. I realized these changes in myself and resented them. But somehow I didn’t seem to have the power to throw them off.
The boss who discharged me hated to do it, and was as kind about it as he possibly could be. He assured me that it was not because I wasn’t doing my work well. Then, realizing that this was an unnecessary thing to say, he cleared his throat, embarrassed. They all knew there was no part of a printer’s work that I didn’t understand and couldn’t do. But the new management’s policy was for young men. My only fault was accumulated years.