A great many unjust requirements were made of the girls. It was not fair to make us attend certain sermons. Goodness knows, we were tired enough when we got home, and most of us just wanted to go to our rooms; and if we did desire entertainment or relaxation, we wanted to choose it for ourselves. I believe some of these old rules are not enforced to-day.
Then that ten o'clock rule! Really it was a shame! Just fancy writing feverishly upon some beautiful (to me it was beautiful) story or poem, and all of a sudden the lights going out! That was maddening, and sometimes I swore as Lolly did, and I cried once when I had reached a place in my story that I simply had to finish, and I tried to do it in the dark.
So I was determined to move, and Lolly went about looking for rooms for us. I told her I'd like anything she got.
Meanwhile life in the yards began to "get upon my nerves." I never before knew that I had nerves; but I knew it now. No one, not even a girl of the abounding health and spirits I then enjoyed, could work eight hours a day at a type-writer and two or three hours writing at night, and be in love besides, and not feel some sort of strain.
And I was in love. I don't suppose any girl was ever more utterly and hopelessly in love than I was then. No matter what I was doing or where I was,—even when I wrote my stories,—he was always back there in my mind. It was almost as though he had hypnotized me.
Loving is, I suppose, a sort of bliss. One can get a certain amount of real joy and excitement out of loving; but it's pretty woeful when one must love alone, and that was my case. You see, though I knew I had made a kind of impression upon Mr. Hamilton, or, as he himself put it, he was "interested" in me, still he certainly was not in love with me, and I had little or no hope now of making him care for me.
I realized that he belonged to a different social sphere. He was a rich, powerful man, of one of the greatest families in America, and I—I was a working-girl, a stenographer of the stock-yards. Only in novels or a few sensational newspaper stories did millionaires fall in love with and marry poor, ignorant working-girls, and then the working-girl was sure to be a beauty. I was not a beauty. Some people said I was pretty, but I don't think I was even that. I had simply the fresh prettiness that goes hand in hand with youth, and youth gallops away from us like a race-horse, eager to reach the final goal. No, I was not pretty. I looked odd, and when I began to wear fine clothes, I must have appeared very well, for I had all sorts of compliments paid to me. I was told that I looked picturesque, interesting, fascinating, distinguished, lovely, and even more flattering things that were not true. It showed what clothes will do.
I was not, however, wearing fine clothes at this time. My clothes were of the simplest—sailor shirtwaist, navy-blue cloth skirt, and a blue sailor hat with a rolled-up brim. That was how I dressed until the night Lolly lent me some of her finery.
My only hope lay in pulling myself up by my talent. If I achieved fame, that, perhaps, I felt, would put me on a level with this man. But fame seemed as elusive and as far away as the stars above me.
Then, his insistence that I should be educated and his statement that I was illiterate made me pause in my thought to take reckoning of myself. If, indeed, my ignorance was so patent that it was revealed in my mere speech, how, then, could I hope to achieve anything? I felt very badly about that, and when I read over some of my beloved poems, instead of their giving me the former pride and delight, I felt, instead, a deep-seated grief and dissatisfaction, so that I tore them up, and then wept just as if I had destroyed some living thing.