Angela's Business

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

And then Charles Garrott knew, quite suddenly and finally, that this, indeed, was no talk in a book, but the realest thing in the world; that this incredible had really happened: that Mary Wing, the "hard" Career-Maker, was tossing her Career away....

He stood quite silenced, while she spoke her last decisive word.

"So you see you have a wrong idea of—what I'm doing, altogether. I appreciate your—being so interested—I value it, you know that," said Mary Wing in a controlled voice, hard even. "But I can't leave you thinking that I'm simply sacrificing myself—to my mother, for instance. It isn't that way at all. Of course, I'm no more to mother than mother is to me. It's not a sacrifice.... Or, rather—I'm in the position that people are always in—more or less. Either way, I've got to sacrifice—and this is the way I choose. But it's getting very dark. I must light the lamps."

She rose as she spoke, and having risen, bent again, to snap on, superfluously, her little desk-light. And as she so stood and bent, the large hand of Charles Garrott reached out suddenly, and began to pat her shoulder.

She seemed but a slip of a girl, no more, that he, Charles, could have tossed upon his shoulder, and so walked out upon a journey. But here, in a wink, she had shot up so tall upon his horizon that he himself, beside her, seemed to possess no significance at all. She might be right, she might be wrong: but, to him, the authority, this crashing negation of the Ego was the flung banner of a splendid trustworthiness, a fitness to lead her own life, indeed, such as should not be questioned henceforward. Never had this woman's independence of him spoken out to him with so clarion a voice as now. And still, over and through her unemotional firmness, the sense of what a giving-up was here swelled in him almost overwhelmingly. It was the brilliant prize of ten years' checkered struggle that his old friend to-day so stoically threw away. Here was a refusal which would touch every corner of her life to its farthest reaches....

So Charles Garrott's warring sensations, his humility and his pride in her, had instinctively expressed themselves in the awkward mute gesture of his sympathies.

By chance, it was Mary's more distant shoulder that his novel impulse had prompted him to pat and go on patting: so, from the accident of their positions, an eye-witness might have been with difficulty convinced that this man's arm was not actually about the slim figure of his friend. But a jury, without doubt, would have accepted the friend's attitude, her entire indifference to what was going on, as fair proof that this was purely a modern proceeding, and no caress. To ask why he did this clearly did not enter Mary's head. Had she been a man, indeed, or he her father, she could hardly have seemed more unaffected by Charles Garrott's unexampled ministrations.

With what speech he meant to accompany and justify his pattings, Charles had not stopped to think. He had, in fact, himself just become conscious of them, when Mary, straightening up, said suddenly in her normal voice:—

"There's the telephone ringing. Excuse me a minute."

She gave him a brief look in passing, which may have been intended as some sort of courteous acknowledgment of the pattings after all. And then she disappeared into the hall, putting an end to talk: inopportunely he felt; leaving him with, a vague sense of inartistic incompletion....