After the last of the visitors had gone and the clock pointed to five he said: “Of course I’m going to be dragged some place this evening, so I wouldn’t have much time––but may I come to supper? I’m going out of town next week. There, isn’t that a good reason to come to-night?”
“Suppose the world knew this––our little business world?”
“Hang the world!”
“You never did. You flattered it, and were delighted when the world patted you on the head and said, ‘Nice Stevens, come in and bring your bags of gold––the living’s fine.’”
“Are you starting in to tell me that people would misunderstand my motives? Sezanne del Monte has chapters along those lines. And Beatrice has quite a fad of slumming and taking a notebook along to write down new slang phrases or oaths or bits of heart-broken philosophy spilled in a drunken moment.... 192 I’ve grown careless to everything presumably orderly and conventional. I’m ready to walk the plank for my indifference if need be––but I do want to come home with you for supper!”
Mary did not answer for a moment. Then she said, in a quick breathless tone, as if she did not want to hear her own words: “I wonder if it would do any good to try explaining––really explaining and not fibbing or pretending–––”
“It has always done me good when you have explained––and I can’t imagine you telling cheap untruths.”
“Then I will try it.” The gray eyes grew stormy. “For if we are to continue as employer and secretary––and you must have such a person and I must earn my living––it would be much easier if you really understood and it was all settled. You’ve talked about early hardships, misunderstood childhood, goat tending, and what not; and the world gives you credit for your achievements. Then surely you must understand the woman’s end of the game––the American woman’s part in business, for it’s not easy to be errand girl or to fill endless underpaid clerical positions. It’s not easy to pile out every morning at such and such an hour and stand at a desk and work as if you had neither heart nor eye for the other things in life until gradually the woman part of yourself is changed and it is often too late to enjoy anything but desk drudgery––and a bonus!
“Now the man in the business game forgoes nothing; he has the world’s applause if he succeeds and the kisses of the woman he loves for his recreation, and all is complete and as it should be. But we commercial women of to-day do a man’s work and 193 earn a man’s wage. We do stay starved women, even if that fact doesn’t appear on the surface. We cannot have the things of romance as well as our livelihood. And by the very nature of the average business woman’s life she is often in love with someone in her office––from propinquity if for no other reason. She must. Don’t you see? They’re practically the only men she really comes to know or who come to know her, and she just can’t stab her heart into sudden death.
“So she wears her prettiest frock for this man––a wooden-faced bookkeeper perhaps; or a preoccupied president––and she dreams of him and is jealous of him and very likely gossips about him. And the years pass and she stays just as shut away and misunderstood and starved. And sometimes a woman, originally the most honest in the world, under these circumstances will deliberately steal another woman’s husband if she has the chance. Yes, she will––she does.”