After a few painfully futile attempts to meet and rebuff these hostile waves, Jessica gave up the effort, and arranged matters so that she could work in the living-room beyond, within call if she were needed, but out of the visual range of her persecutors. Lucinda encountered them instead, and gave homely but vigorous Rolands for their Olivers. It was in the interchange of these remarks that the chief danger, to the struggling little business lay, for if genuine customers heard them, why, there was an end to everything. It is not easy to portray the girl’s relief as week after week went by, and time brought not only no open scandal, but a marked diminution of annoyance. When Jessica was no longer visible, interest in the sport lagged. To come merely for the sake of baiting Lucinda was not worth the while. And when these unfriendly visits slackened, and then fell off almost altogether, Jessica hugged to her breast the notion that it was because these rough young people had softened toward and begun to understand and sympathize with her.
It was the easier to credit this kindly hypothesis in that she had already won the suffrages of a considerable circle of working-girls. To explain how this came about would be to analyze many curious and apparently contradictory phases of untutored human nature, and to recount many harmless little stratagems and well-meant devices, and many other frankly generous words and actions which came from hearts not the less warm because they beat amid the busy whir of the looms, or throbbed to the time of the seamstress’s needle.
Jessica’s own heart was uplifted with exultation, sometimes, when she thought upon the friendliness of these girls. So far as she knew and believed, every one of them was informed as to her past, and there was no reason beyond their own inclination why they should take stock in her intentions for the future. To a slender few, originally suggested by Lucinda, and then confirmed by her own careful scrutiny, she had confided the crude outlines of her scheme—that is, to build up a following among the toilers of her own sex, to ask from this following no more than a decent living for work done, and to make this work include not merely the details of millinery and hints about dress, but a general mental and material helpfulness, to take practical form step by step as the means came to hand and the girls themselves were ready for the development. Whenever she had tried to put this into words, its melancholy vagueness had been freshly apparent to her, but the girls had believed in her! That was the great thing.
And they had brought others, and spread the favorable report about, until even now, in the dead season, lying half way between Christmas and the beginning of Lent, she was kept quite busy. To be sure, her patrons were not governed much by these holiday dates at any time, and she was undoubtedly doing their work better and more cheaply than it could ever have been done for them before, but their good spirit in bringing it was none the less evident for that.
And out of the contact with this good spirit, Jessica began to be dimly conscious of getting great stores of strength for herself. If it could be all like this, she felt that her life would be ideally happy. She had not the skill of mind to separate her feelings, and contrast and weigh them one against the other, but she knew clearly enough that she was doing what afforded her keen enjoyment, and it began to be apparent that merely by doing it she would come to see more clearly, day by day, how to expand and ennoble her work. The mission which Annie Fairchild had urged upon her and labored to fit her for, and which she had embraced and embarked upon with only the vaguest ideas as to means or details or specific aims, was unfolding itself inspiringly before her.
During this period she wrote daily to the good woman who had sent her upon this work—short letters setting forth tersely the events and outcome of the day—and the answers which came twice a week helped greatly to strengthen her.
And do not doubt that often she stood in grave need of strength! The mere matter of regular employment itself was still more or less of a novelty to her; regular hours still found her physically rebellious. The restraints of a shop, of studied demeanor, of frugal meals, of no intimate society save that of one dull girl,—these still wore gratingly upon her nerves, and produced periodical spasms of depression and gloom, in which she was much tortured by doubts about herself and the utility of what she was doing.
Sometimes, too, these doubts took the positive form of temptation—of a wild kind of longing to get back again into the atmosphere where bright lights shone on beautiful dresses, and the hours went swiftly, gayly by with jest, and song, and the sparkle of the amber air-beads rising in the tall wine-glasses. There came always afterward the memory of those other hours which dragged most gruesomely, when the daylight made all tawdry and hateful once more, and heartaches ruled where smiles had been. Yet still these unbidden yearnings would come, and then the girl would set her teeth tight together, and thrust her needle through the mutinous tears till they were exorcised.
It had been in her unshaped original plan to do a good deal for her father, but this proved to be more easily contemplated than done. Once the little rooms had been made habitable for her and Lucinda, there remained next to nothing for him to do. He came around every morning, when some extraordinary event, such as a job of work or a fire, did not interfere, and offered his services, but he knew as well as they did that this was a mere amiable formality. He developed a great fondness for sitting by the stove in Jessica’s small working room, and either watching her industrious fingers or sleeping calmly in his chair. Perhaps the filial instinct was not strong in Lucinda’s composition; perhaps it had been satiated by over-close contact during those five years of Jessica’s absence. At any rate, the younger girl did not enjoy Ben’s presence as much as her sister seemed to, and almost daily detracted from his comfort by suggestions that the apartments were very small, and that a man hanging around all day took up a deplorable amount of room.
It had been Jessica’s notion, too, that she and her sister would walk out in the evenings under the escort of their father, and thus secure themselves from misapprehension. But Lucinda rebelled flatly against this, at least until Ben had some new clothes, and the money for these was not forthcoming. Jessica did find it possible to spare a dollar or so to her father weekly, and there had been a nebulous understanding that this was to be applied to raiment; but the only change in his appearance effected by this so far had been a sporadic accession of startlingly white paper collars.