She thought it would be cheap and cowardly and absurd, after murdering real love as she had done, to philander across its grave.
When at last she was able to pay back Mason's loan in full, with accumulated interest, she was surprised to find how little happier it made her. For nearly three years she had lived with her debt on the assumption that it was life's most insupportable burden. Now that it was settled, she began to realize that she had entertained the angel of success in disguise. The debt had been her most dynamic inspiration.
The man she loved had borrowed to lend to her. Quite possibly in so doing he had saved her life. In return she had broken her promise to marry him. Immediately he had begun to prosper and she to fall on evil days. Pride could not be more humiliated. To save her face before him, it was absolutely indispensable for her to prosper also in her turn, by her own will and skill; to pay him off to the last accumulated mill of interest; to prove to him that she had done as well without him as he had done without her; to make him know that she was very, very happy and content.
When her hopes came true and she enlarged her quarters and took a third assistant and opened a checking account, and alternated Saturdays off with L. Frankland; when her hopes came true they weren't hopes any more, but history. For anyone with the gambler's instinct, and Georgia had more than a little of it, yesterday is a dull affair compared with to-morrow.
It gives one a mighty respectable feeling to have the receiving teller smile and say, "What—you—again?" when you come to his window. Then he writes a new total in your book in purple ink and you peek at it once or twice on your way back to the office.
Yes, success was very sweet and creditable. It did away with a heap of worry around the first of the month; any woman is happier for not having to make last year's suit do; and people are certainly more polite. Money's the oil of life. But it isn't life.
If you're only thirty, and the dollar's all you want, or get—Georgia leaned back in her pivot chair and stretched her arms above her head and yawned, ho-ho-hum, the stodgy man will get you if you don't watch out.
"Frank," she asked, "do you ever feel like an automaton that's been wound up and has to keep going till it runs down!"
"Sure. Everybody does, now and then."
"But what's the use? what's the answer?" continued Georgia querulously.