“Is it this social work you want to do?” she asked, remembering dimly things she had heard of new standpoints.
“Why, I don’t think so. I thought I’d try to get on a newspaper. And if that doesn’t work, I cut some ads out of the paper.”
“You don’t mean you’d do housework!” gasped her aunt to whom advertisements in newspapers meant “girl wanted for general housework.”
Horatia laughed in pure joy. It was one of those rare free moments which come at the beginning of new work and new adventures and she enjoyed shaking up Aunt Caroline.
“Not—especially.” Then from the foot of the steps she turned to wave back at the stout lady on the doorstep.
“Don’t fret,” she called. “Home for dinner.”
“Everyone,” she sang to herself as she went down the hill, “has the right to shock an older person once in a while. It’s the breath of youth. And the old dears really love it. So long as you are respectable—they love it.”
As she turned the corner she looked back for a moment at the house she had left, dramatizing her new freedom and the house too as a sober symbol of what she was so gladly leaving. The Grant house stood high on a hill overlooking the lake. It was built of blackish stone, which at one time had been the material of wealth and dignity in the city, and it still looked down on the stucco and plaster new houses which clustered beneath it, with a kind of glum faith in its superiority. But the illusion was its own. It awed no one any more, least of all Horatia, who had been brought up to respect it.
Inside were rooms papered in browns and streaked green and filled with walnut furniture which had all the ugliness of an ugly outworn fashion and yet none of the interest of antiques. There were several unsoftened leather sofas—unsoftened because the Grants had never been a family to “lie down in the daytime,” and the chairs were chairs—so many places to sit down, but boasting neither beauty nor comfort. At the windows curtains of imitation Brussels lace gave the finishing touch to the unimaginative furnishings. They too were stiff and artificial, like the stone dog who sat so grimly on the terrace outside. Horatia had called the place home since she was six years old. She had no quarrel with it but it had ceased to interest her. It stood still—impassive—and she, like the breeze and the sunlight, was moving.
It was a clear morning—a bright morning, one of the days on which someone always should start out to seek a fortune. There was energy in the wind and good luck in the sunlight and romance in the face of everyone she met. Even on the way to the suburban train, though she knew nearly everyone she met, they all seemed imbued with new spirit and more interesting qualities. She met Miss Pettikin, and saw not the shabby little dressmaker but the heroine of some blighted romance. She saw the Reverend Williams, not as the man who had read the marriage service so stupidly the night before but as a man with a holy mission. She saw Joe Peter, the neighborhood gardener, and he became Labor just as Mr. Jeffry panting on his way to the train became Capital. She saw herself as a lovely and interesting young woman in whom everyone on the train was interested and she hoped that behind every newspaper lurked a man with a brain, worth her knowing. The world was full of life and interest and she was going to get her share of it. And as the train swayed and jerked as only a suburban train can do, she pulled out her notebook and speculated on her first adventure.