Angela's Business

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

And it seemed to Charles, all at once, that Mary had accidentally stated exactly what was the matter with her, as a woman and a friend. It seemed to him suddenly that ever since he had known this girl he had been going to her and saying, "Look here, I'll help you do such and such," and she, in one way or another, had always been replying, "Why, you couldn't help ME!"

The conversation between the two old friends thus abruptly thinned out. It became almost desultory on his part, not untouched with dignity. And as they so chatted of Lee Grammar School and its unfavorable location, he, the authority, was eyeing Mary Wing askance, unmistakably reacting.... Was hardness, then, the necessary corollary of "independence"? Was it true, exactly as Old Tories said, that a woman could not grapple long with actuality without rubbing away that natural sweetness and charm of hers which, it might be, the grim world needed more than duplicate Careers? Certainly there was no charm for him in this slip of a girl's self-assertion: "I'm a better man than you, don't you know it?" Splendid, indeed, was her Spartan calm in a defeat serious in every way, and with the peculiar sting conferred by Miss Trevenna's fame. Why was it that he would have warmed to her so infinitely more, have felt quite a new depth of affection for her, if, rather, she had turned to him helpless and wildly weeping, "Help me! Help me, friend, or I perish!"

"And at least you'll get out much earlier in the afternoons," he was observing courteously....

But his secret thought continued to engross him, this fantastic thought of Mary weeping. Now he remembered Miss Angela's girlish outburst last night, after the bridge-party; and he saw that there was something subtly fitting, engaging on the whole, in a woman's weeping over her troubles. But Mary, of course, could not weep; she simply didn't have the plant, as you might put it. No—you could picture Mary asking you to sit on the sofa and look at her ring, more easily than weeping.

And then, becoming aware of a teacher hovering about in the corridor near the door,—a fellow named Hartwell it was, who had long seemed rather attentive to Mary,—Charles Garrott rose to go, a mere polite caller.

"Isn't it time you were knocking off?"

"I think I'd better clear up a little more of this, now that I'm at it."

"I wonder if I couldn't help you with some of that?"

"Oh, no, thank you." (Why, of course he couldn't help HER, even to tear up old papers.) "Nobody could understand it but me. But I've—appreciated your visit."

He wished her a good-afternoon. In a stately silence, he traversed the spacious corridor, stalked down the handsome stairways. For the moment, he could not get his thought back to the concrete; the sting of defeat possessed him, the bitterness that is the portion of the friend of women. And then, in this mood, shaking the dust of the High School from his feet, he encountered, of all inopportune people under the sun, Miss Flora Trevenna.