He shrugged himself into his overcoat and departed stiffly. He had worked hard over his books that afternoon, and his legs and arms were aching in unison with his head. He came back for a moment to turn off some of the big lights.
“No use wasting electricity,” he explained. “No one will be in this evening, and a little girl like you can’t use all this light.”
A minute later Ann heard the street door at the foot of the stairs close with a bang, and she was left all alone in the big office.
She was not sorry to be alone. The day had been hard, and her nerves had been near the breaking point all the afternoon. The switchboard was Ann’s special charge, but she also took care of the odds and ends of copy work and dictation for her busy associates. Odds and ends have a curious way of accumulating and Ann seldom had a spare moment.
“I’m just dead tired,” she declared aloud, raising her arms above her head in a vain effort to relieve their ache. “I’m always snowed under with work, yet no one seems to think I have anything to do. It’s just: ‘Miss Carstairs, will you copy that for me?’ ‘I’ll give you a letter now, Miss Carstairs, and you can run it off in your spare time.’ Spare time! Did any one ever see me with a moment to spare? They don’t think I amount to a row of pins, anyway. I’d just like to show them; I’d like to let Mr. Ross see that I do amount to something.”
Mr. Ross was the senior partner of the big manufacturing plant, and eighteen-year-old Ann admired him immensely. He was so calm, so quiet, and yet so forceful; a splendid business man, but one whose family’s wants and wishes were cared for before all else. Ann knew he must be an ideal father, for he possessed all the qualities that Ann’s own father had lacked.
Mr. Carstairs had been far from an ideal parent and had ended his selfish, careless life just as Ann was preparing to enter college. Ann and her mother had bravely gathered together what money remained, and Ann started off to a business school instead.
For three months she worked feverishly night and day, and at the end of that time, when their finances were in a precarious condition, she left the school to enter the manufacturing firm of Ross and Hayward. She had been there for nearly two years now, years of worry and careful planning to make the slender salary cover growing needs.
“We have almost proved that the necessities of life are unnecessary, so nearly have we come to getting along on next to nothing,” she had laughingly told her mother only the evening before.