R. Browning.
Following Rose's suggestion, and because for the time being there really seemed nothing for her to do, unless she could show herself a little better trained, Joan joined the County Council Night Schools in the neighbourhood. She would go there five evenings in the week; three for shorthand and two for typing. Her fellow scholars were drawn from all ages and all ranks—clerks, office boys, and grey-headed men; girls with their hair still in pig-tails, and elderly women with patient, strained faces, who would sit at their desks plodding through the intricacies of shorthand and paying very little attention to what went on all round them.
The boy and girl section of the community indulged in a little rough and tumble love-making. Even long office hours and the deadly monotony of standing behind desk or counter all day could not quite do away with the riotous spirit of youth. They giggled and chattered among themselves, and passed surreptitious notes from one form to the other when Mr. Phillips was not looking.
Mr. Phillips, the shorthand master, was a red-faced, extremely irascible little man. He came to these classes from some other school in the city where he had been teaching all day, and naturally, by the time evening arrived, his none too placid temper had been stretched to breaking-point. He was extremely impatient with any non-comprehension of his complicated method of instruction; and he would pass from row to row, after his dictation had been finished, snatching away the papers from his paralysed pupils and tearing them into fragments had the exercise been badly done.
Joan noticed the man who sat next her on the first and every night. He was quite the worst person she had ever seen at learning anything. He was not by any means young, grey already showed in the hair above his ears, and his forehead wrinkled with innumerable lines. He had, she thought, the most pathetic eyes, large and honest, but quite irredeemably stupid.
"I can't make head or tale of it," he confessed to her on the second night. "And Mr. Phillips gets so annoyed with me, it only muddles me more."
"Why do you bother to learn?" she asked. It seemed rather strange that a man of his age should have to struggle with so elementary a subject.
"I have worked in an office for the last ten years," he explained. "The new boss has suddenly decided that shorthand is necessary. I don't know," he spoke rather vaguely, his eyes wandering round the room, "but it is just possible he might ask me to go if I did not master it. I have been there so long I hardly like to have to look for another place."
"It seems such a shame," Joan told Rose afterwards, "that these people can never get a place where they feel really safe. They live always expecting to be turned off at a moment's notice, or to have somebody put in on top of them. Everybody seems to be fighting against everybody else; doesn't anyone ever stop to help?"
The older girl laughed. "Why, yes," she said. "The world, or at least the people in it, are not so bad as all that. Only life is a case of push and struggle, and it is only natural that people should want to get the best they can for their money. Also it wouldn't be fair if the ones who worked best were not preferred to the others."