“Do you mean that you would refuse?”
“Of course!”
He seemed staggered; he looked about him as one amazed. He had kept this back as the last, the supreme temptation, the very last card in his hand; and he had played it, and behold, it proved to be no trump.
“I would neither marry you nor go out with you, nor do I wish to have anything to say to you, except so far as business is concerned. As that seems impossible, it will be better for me to give you a week’s notice, Mr. Slotman.”
“You’ll be sorry for it,” he said—“infernally sorry for it. It ain’t pleasant to starve, my girl!”
“I had to do it, I had to, or I could not have respected myself any longer,” the girl thought, as she made her way home that evening to the boarding-house, where for two pounds a week she was fed and lodged. But to be workless! It had been the nightmare of her dreams, the haunting fear of her waking hours.
In her room at the back of the house, to which the jingle of the boarding-house piano could yet penetrate, she sat for a time in deep thought. The past had held a few friends, folk who had been kind to her. Pride had held her back; she had never asked help of any of them. She thought of the Australian uncle who had invited her to come out to him when she should leave school, and then had for some reason changed his mind and sent her a banknote for a hundred pounds instead. She had felt glad and relieved at the time, but now she regretted his decision. Yet there had been a few friends; she wrote down the names as they occurred to her.
There was old General Bartholomew, who had known her father. There was Mrs. Ransome. No, she believed now that she had heard that Mrs. Ransome was dead; perhaps the General too, yet she would risk it. There was Lady Linden, Marjorie Linden’s aunt. She knew but little of her, but remembered her as at heart a kindly, though an autocratic dame. She remembered, too, that one of Lady Linden’s hobbies had been to establish Working Guilds and Rural Industries, Village Crafts, and suchlike in her village. In connection with some of these there might be work for her.
She wrote to all that she could think of, a letter of which she made six facsimile copies. It was not a begging appeal, but a dignified little reminder of her existence.
“If you could assist me to obtain any work by which I might live, you would be putting me under a deep debt of gratitude,” she wrote.