"What's the trouble with all the servants in this town?" cried Hen. "I tell you, Cally, I don't know what's going to become of us. Why ..."
She launched with zest upon the somewhat unoriginal thesis, and Cally relapsed into her own thoughts, which were full of rebellion at the bitter untowardness of her fate....
Much water had flowed under the bridge of sighs since the parting in the library. Passed long since, it seemed, was that uprush of burning humiliation; subdued was the betraying flare-up (mamma's favorite word nowadays)--vanished to thin air like a midsummer madness, delirium's delusion, hardly possible to understand, much less recapture, now. A day had hardly passed, after the second rejection of Mr. Canning at her door, before the thought of whistling him back again flashed luringly across Carlisle's mind. She repelled the thought, but it recurred, and she came to dally with it, ably assisted in that direction by mamma. What had he done to warrant such absurd melodramatics?... More and more her mind had fastened upon the genuine tenderness, the emotion, the man had shown in his last moment with her. In love with her without quite realizing it himself, he had in the moment of parting been swept away by his feelings, and had taken a not strictly authorized kiss or two. What Sir Galahad among men was proof against such a tripping in the presence of lovely and irresistible temptation?...
"Hortense gave you no notice at all?" she demanded out of a dream.
"Did you ever? Why, honestly, Cally ..."
He was to pause once again, to bid the Paynes farewell, on his final progress back to what he had once called lights and home. That would be in April, said Cousin Willie Kerr, when his six months' sentence ran out. The distant promise brought the girl no comfort now. Why, really, should she not take this new opportunity he had given her, and dispatch him a little note, saying in a friendly way that she had wanted to see him again? By day after to-morrow, he could be at her side....
It was a little note that mamma, though ignorant of the circumstances, had so specially recommended in the desolate weeks; had commanded, offered bribes for, cried for with real tears, blustered and threatened for with a purpling birthmark. In her own mind the girl had already worded many which met the situation with merely a front of sweet generosity, carrying no forfeiture of dignity, no real acknowledgment of surrender. What was the fibre of foolish hardness in her that resisted all mamma's importunities, all her own urgent wisdom?
"Five years ago," said Hen, "we paid eight dollars a month, and got really good ones. Now the greenest of them holds you up for twelve and fourteen. Hortense was simply bribed off...."
Cally roused, glancing about. "Papa says," she observed, absently, "it will all end in something like the French Revolution. Heavens! What a perfectly sickening street!"
"Isn't it?" said Hen, cheerfully. "Yet it's interesting too, Cally, for this is where the city makes all its money."