“Miss Precore,” she began in her tense voice, artificially accented here and there with a dash of pseudo-New York, “I am Hortense Quinby, I live in Greenwich Village, and perhaps I should say I starve in Greenwich Village. I have watched your rise into fame, not with envy but with admiration and respect. You are young, beautiful, talented; you have the world in the palm of your little hand. I do not ask you to be anything unreasonable—but I do implore your help. Let me become essential to you in some capacity—a secretary, a housekeeper, a maid—I hold myself above no office if it concerns the right person. I play accompaniments fairly well—not as well as you would wish for public appearances but for your practice-hour. I am one of those who have failed,” here a deep-seated sigh. “I came from a small town in the middle part of the state about ten years ago; every one thought I had great literary ability as well as musical. But there was no one to help me get across—perhaps when one’s talents are divided one is to be pitied.”
She said all this, scarcely pausing. Now she stopped to breathe.
“Really, Miss Quinby, I have every one I need,” Thurley said gently.
“But I have not,” returned Miss Quinby to her amazement. “Be generous, lovely young thing, be generous to us who have failed. I am not asking for fame—merely to become associated with it.” She held out her hands dramatically. “Do not send me back to be ground down again!”
“I don’t need you,” Thurley protested, most perturbed.
“I need you. My life cannot be lived as are thousands of women’s lives, bounded by the price of calico and two weeks’ vacation in a lake cottage. I have a soul above pots and pans—a fearless soul, capable of enduring all things to achieve my aim. Let me be your inspiration—you think I could not?” The restless eyes were dangerous and somewhat vindictive.
Miss Quinby proceeded to enumerate her abilities and the capacities in which she had served. As nearly as Thurley could understand a comic opera singer stranded in Miss Quinby’s home town had heard her sing and idly encouraged the girl. Some one financed the comic opera singer on to New York and she thought no more of the incident. Not so with Hortense Quinby. From the moment she had been told she had “a voice” and a “future” and “get out of this hole, my dear”—everything in her present scheme of things had been abandoned. She came to New York only to find the opera singer absorbed in her own difficulties and to battle alone with her “voice” and her “future” and her having left “the dreadful hole.”
She had tried magazine work; rejection slips enough to have papered the boarding house were the result. She had, sadly enough, a glimmer of the divine spark which led her on a madcap chase during which the best years of girlhood were wasted. She became socialist and follower of long-haired, East Side gentlemen’s magazines which the authorities usually made a bonfire of, locking up the long-haired gentlemen. She was prominent in visiting them in the Tombs and giving out dangerous statements to the press, in hopes, really, of being locked up herself and thus appearing as a martyr. There are so many would-be martyrs, self-inflicted benefactors of the public. But it is sometimes as hard work to gain persecution and as futile as the task of the men who are paid seven dollars a day to trace the history of seven cents. So Hortense Quinby had found it. No one listened to her nor locked her up and admitted sob sisters to write down her ravings in the good old-fashioned dot-and-asterisk style. But, great Beatrice Fairfax, this was not all wherein she had suffered! Thurley was, by turns, amused, bored, thoughtful and finally mentally depressed as the recital of the past flowed on in reels.
She had started a paper herself, only to have it fail in a dismal way. There was not enough of danger in it to have the postal authorities take the matter up. She had lived among the East Side fanatics, had been second housemaid in a rich New Yorker’s family, hoping to observe the scandals of the leisure class and publish them later on. Evidently, she had been unable to divulge glorious scandals, she had a cast off hat of one of the daughters of the family, a decent sort of room and better food than Greenwich Village had offered and the third day she was kindly dismissed for general lack of qualifications. She had tried playing accompaniments, had done china painting, suped in Broadway comedies, had done everything that a woman troubled by a “liberated soul” could do and yet she had not made herself invaluable to any one really worth the while. She wanted to attach herself to Thurley, a sort of figurative third-rail affair, the inspiration and strength of Thurley’s youthful self.
Thurley, bewildered from the outpouring and wishing some one would come and spirit her away, weakly said she could come in to take some dictation for correspondence once a week or do other minor tasks.