“And you aren’t queer at all,” said Langley, “you’re a perfect product of what the nice cleanliness of West Park would produce with a college education superimposed on it. Why don’t you leave things alone, young lady? Your realities may be stupid but they are clean and straight. Why do you want to get tangled up and wrinkled up? Wouldn’t the West Park High School perhaps be a better solution than the newspaper? Or a good husband?”
She smiled at him.
“You smile now but later you’ll be sorry. You think you know about troubles because you’ve studied sociology and heard a lot of war lecturers. But you really are quite untouched. And life hurts. Even in West Park it must hurt, but in a city, in work—it probably will hurt much more. And besides the world isn’t the place it used to be, with clean-cut issues and a welcome for the young romanticist. It is worn with war, and very tired and a bit unscrupulous and there are no ideals left which haven’t been tampered with——”
“But we have to live in it just the same,” argued Horatia.
“You might enter a convent.” At which they both laughed, for it was so absurd to think of Horatia in a convent.
“Your people will probably object to your taking a job on my paper,” said Langley at length; “maybe you will when you hear more about me. I can’t pay you enough to make it worth your while financially. But perhaps if you want to come and will take the work I can give you and try to increase our circulation, I can find a desk for you anyway.” And having committed himself, the editor looked as if he were calling himself a fool in his thoughts.
“I’ll work for anything you’ll pay me,” said Horatia, “and I don’t think anyone can frighten me away from your paper, Mr. Langley. When can I come?”
“Good luck to begin on Monday.”
“I shall be at the office on Monday morning,” she promised, with a thrill, a young thrill in her voice.
She left the restaurant with all the spirit of the morning reinforced. Friday—Saturday—Sunday—then she would be at work. It wasn’t hard to find work. She would try very hard to make what she wrote interesting and possibly soon people would be buying the newspaper to read what she had written, and Langley would say—even so do fresh college graduates dream. But the college graduate of ten years back walked back to the office over the lake and told Bob Brotherton apropos of nothing that there was always a new way in which to make a damned fool of oneself.