And she had answered, “I came,” giving therewith the answer to all his implied questionings in her tone. He gave her a desk and told her briefly, almost abruptly, what he thought she could do. She could “cover” certain meetings for them, mostly big lectures and concerts that must be reported, with such theater notices as would be necessary and for the rest, it would be mostly writing up the notes of Bob Brotherton, or Charley Jones, the other reporter, when their work crowded them too much.
“You see,” he explained, “you take no one’s place but you can relieve the pressure on all of us.”
That was the outline of her work but compressed in the outline she found ten and sometimes twelve hours a day of fascination. The two other men had taken her advent rather smilingly but they soon found her useful. She learned to read their handwriting, to decipher their notes, to write a story from their verbal outline. And “in spite of her typewriting,” said Langley, “it is good copy.”
Little by little she had come into the confidences of the office. The men talked freely in front of her, tried to show her how to typewrite, explained their standards, told of their own histories and ambitions. Bob Brotherton had meant to write and was particularly expansive about his wasted ambition when he had been drinking a little. Horatia came to recognize the effect of liquor in his conversation and to discount it. She liked him too because Langley had told her something of Bob’s miseries, his domestic tragedy of an insane wife and a feeble-minded child, both now in institutions somewhere. And it was impossible to keep from liking Charley Jones, out of college three years and hoping, praying and urging that Labor would come into its own soon. All the problems of the city and of the country, even of the world, were met in the little office by Bob’s literary pessimism, Charley’s cure-all and the philosophical endurance of Langley. Langley never got angry or excited. When the others were tangled as to policy or inner meanings, he hit the truth on the head with some single sentence. Horatia, sitting at her typewriter or at her table with her back to them all, would catch herself listening for his comment and when it came would seize upon it as truth and final.
She had no idea of how much she had changed the office, of how much more work and less idling had come with her. Perhaps because her dogged determined industry made them ashamed, perhaps because her uplifted profile at the window or her apologetic frowning smile at some mistake she had made charmed them, they all worked with a new energy. And they were all amazed at her lack of self-consciousness. They were experienced, each in his own way, and they watched her for those traces of self-consciousness which break down the barriers between business and personal relations. But there was none of it. She never blushed, she never seemed afraid. It was all interest—pure interest.
“I can’t get it,” said Bob one day after she had left the office. “She likes it here. What does she see in this decrepit sheet to interest her? She ought to be listening to troubadours under her window, instead of pounding a typewriter.”
“Precisely,” said Langley, a little over-dryly. “She ought, but she wouldn’t. She’s gone on a hunt for her own romance—that’s what the modern young girl does instead of having it brought to her.”
“And she’s found it here?” grinned Bob.
Langley shrugged his shoulders and tilted his pipe.
“Temporarily. The view helps.”