Mosscrop had lifted his brows in some surprise. He nodded again, with a cursory “Ay!”
“The editors were not at all kind to me,” she went on. “I toiled like a slave, but I hardly ever got anything accepted, and then you had to wait months for your pay, and perhaps not get it at all. I should have starved long ago, if I hadn’t met an American woman at the Museum who was over here getting up pedigrees. Oh, not for herself. She made a regular business of it. Rich Americans paid her to hunt up their English ancestors, in genealogies and old records, and on tombstones and so on. I was her assistant for nearly a year, and things went fairly well with me. But three months ago she was taken ill and had to go home, and there I was stranded again. I tried to go on with some of the jobs she left unfinished, but the people had gone away, or hadn’t confidence in so young a person, and well—that’s all. My landlady turned me out at six o’clock this morning, and she has seized the few poor things I had left—and here I am.”
The young man lifted his glass, and clinked it against hers. “I am very glad that you are here,” he said; and they smiled wistfully into each other’s eyes as they finished the Capri.
“It is a heavenly little break in the clouds, anyway,” she went on, dreamily. “It isn’t like real life at all: it is the way things happen in fairy stories.”
“Quite so. Why shouldn’t we have a fairy story all by ourselves? It is every whit as easy as the stupid, humdrum other thing, and a million times nicer. Oh, I’m on the side of the fairies, myself.”
She looked out, in an absent fashion, at the windows across the way. The light began to fade from her countenance, and the troubled lines returned. “Every day for a fortnight I have been answering advertisements,” she went on, pensively; “some by letter, some in person. There were secretaries’ places, but you had to know shorthand, and the typewriter, and all that. Then somehow all the vacancies for shop-women got filled before I applied, or else people with experience in the business were preferred to me. I even went in for the ‘lady-help’ thing—a kind of domestic servant, you know, only you get less pay and don’t wear a cap—but nobody would have me. My hair was too good and my boots were too bad. The lady of the house just stared at these two things, every place I applied at, and said she was afraid I wouldn’t answer.”
The picture she drew was painful to Moss-crop, and he made an effort to lighten it with levity. “I confess I didn’t think very highly of your boots, myself,” he said, cheerily, “but I admire your hair immensely.”
“Oh, but you are a man!”
He chuckled amiably at the implication of her retort, and she laughed a little, too, in a reluctant way. “It occurs to me,” he ventured, pausing over his words, “that men seem to have played no part whatever in the story of your life.”
“No, absolutely none,” she answered, with prompt decision. “I have never before been beholden to a man for so much as a biscuit or a shoe-button. I don’t know that you will believe me when I tell you, but I’ve never even been alone in a room with a man before in my life.”