"Anybody," declared Margaret with quick violence, "anybody needs somebody else loving 'em, smoothing 'em down, setting 'em up, brushing off the dust. I know! But you can do that anyway. That just goes on——"
"I wonder. You're a hard-boiled spinster, Margaret. What do you know about it?"
"I know a little thing or two about love. You do it all the time, through and around whatever else you are doing. Not from nine to five exclusively." She settled back, a grimace on her lips, as the door rattled open and Letty's piping was heard. "Didn't stay long, did he? You promise me you'll go down to the Bureau. Quick! Or I'll fight with the King like a——"
"Yes, I'll go down." Catherine laughed. "I'd have to anyway."
And Margaret, smiling at her, ran out to meet Spencer.
XI
Catherine sat at the dining room table, staring down at the straggling columns of figures on the sheet of yellow paper. Her mouth was sullen, mutinous. Mrs. O'Lay came through the hall, her broom swishing behind her. She had been redding up the study, and Catherine had moved her bookkeeping into the dining room. Well, there it was. Appalling totals. Bills and bills and bills. She ran her fingers across the ragged edges of her checkbook stub. No hope there. Then her hand crept past the bills to a long white envelope, bearing the Bureau inscription in one corner. Her check in full for the month, as if she had stayed in Ohio and finished the job. Charles's eyebrows, lifted inquiringly when Miss Kelly had appeared that morning, seemed to arch across her name on that envelope. She had only to take out that slip of paper, scrawl her name and "on deposit" across the back, and she was committed. Last night—Charles clinging to her hand—"It's wonderful, Cathy, having things right again. Don't spoil them." And she cravenly had kept silence.
She looked again at the final figures in her check book. Tiny, impotent sum. Her mind busily added to them the figures of the check. But she couldn't take it, unless she meant to go on. Dr. Roberts intended it as an indication of her permanence, a check for the full month, when she had worked only half of it. Her fingers rested on the slip. The bills, the paltry little balance, worked on her in a sort of desperate fever.
I'd have to give up Mrs. O'Lay, too, she thought, to even things. There'll be doctors' bills. That surgeon. Everything's overdrawn. Have to tell Miss Kelly.