Claire closed the little offending blue book and flung it across the room and when her maid entered she was lying petulantly with her head on her arm, her glorious red hair streaming over her like a glittering veil.
The little book, so helpful and so uplifting, had not helped Claire at all. But that was because in her heart she did not want to be helped. She had lived for herself so long in her queer, cold, brooding fashion that the thought of anything different actually hurt her just as it hurts to stand on one's foot when it is asleep. Claire had held one position of thought for so long that it made her hurt and sting and prickle even to think of moving. So she buried her face in her arm and hid under her shining red hair and studied her queer jade ring and tried to forget the feeling that she might be in the wrong.
Mabel Brewster's awakening was even more disagreeable, although she really deserved it less. She was not accustomed to pickles and cold ham and cheese for supper, as Mrs. Brewster was a careful mother. Also Mabel, to celebrate her great step, had found a light novel, and snapping on a perfectly fascinating reading light at the head of her bed, had proceeded to read until after one o'clock. Then she dreamed! She dreamed that she tried to get out of bed and couldn't because there was a sour green pickle as large as a street car right in the way, and the City Editor sat on top and looked at her from under his green shade and told her that the only way that she could get out was by eating her way through the pickle. So she commenced, while all the society ladies in Louisville looked on and said, "Dear me, isn't it wonderful what a girl can accomplish if she will only leave home, and live for herself?" And the pickle was so sour that it made Mabel shudder with cold and she shuddered herself awake, to find all the bed-clothes on the floor. She got up and made the bed over, and found it was only three o'clock, although she had been hours and hours trying to eat that frightful pickle. The bed was too soft or too hard or something, and she could not get to sleep again for a long while. She was glad to waken again and find that it was morning. Unfortunately, after all the adventures of the night Mabel had over-slept and was obliged to start off to school without breakfast and with her hair ribbon badly tied. Also there was no time to put the apartment in order, and Mabel was rather shocked to find how badly one person could tumble things up.
She half hoped her mother would run around during the morning and put things in shape, but when she unlocked her door at one o'clock, when school was over for the day, she found her bed still unmade, her clothes tumbling out of the suitcase, and the soiled dishes on the kitchen table.
She had cold boiled ham for luncheon, and but little of that because just as she commenced to eat, a telephone call interrupted her. It was Miss Gere asking how soon she would be down with her items and to take up some other work. The items were not written up, and Mabel had to give up her luncheon time to writing them. There was no time to tidy up, and Mabel hurried down town hoping now with all her heart and soul that her mother would not get time to use the duplicate key that Mabel had insisted on her taking. She felt her cheeks burn as she thought of her mother seeing the mess and cleaning it up in her kind way.
Mabel had no cause to worry. When her mother dropped in about four o'clock she merely looked the place over, then sat down and laughed in the strangest manner. Then she carefully went out without disturbing anything, and took a covered basket into the apartment below where she talked for awhile with Mabel's grandmother, who laughed too; laughed hard and long, and who then said mysteriously, "Well, thank you for the rolls, my dear! I think they will do me more good than they would Mabel. And I think I shall not be 'at home' for the next week or so."
Mabel did not get home until six o'clock. She had forgotten to stop at the market, so she had only shredded wheat and milk and pickle for supper. She ate shredded wheat and milk. It was a modern apartment with thin walls. Somebody was having chops and baked apples for supper, and a few minutes later there was a smell of fried chicken. Mabel helped herself to another shredded wheat biscuit.
CHAPTER VII
A week passed. In one corner of the Times-Leader office there was an old-fashioned letter-press. You put the letters between two iron plates and slowly turned a bar that pressed a lever that squeezed the plates together tighter and tighter. A grimy office boy was forever grinding, and as Mabel had many a long wait for her chief, Miss Gere, she commenced to be fascinated by the operation. Her vivid imagination commenced to trouble her. She saw her hand, her arm, her whole self being pressed flat by that dreadful boy. The boy, by the way, being about Mabel's age and totally unconscious of his grubby appearance, noticed Mabel's fascinated stare and accepted it as a personal compliment. He turned the press with a grand flourish and squeezed it close with a darkly frowning brow as though to call attention to his strength.