She held her head high and walked steadily, as she might have gone to her own execution. She felt that something within her was being crushed to death, something clean and fine and sensitive, which must die before she could make herself face Mr. Roberts again. She opened the office door and went in.
Mr. Roberts was at one of the wires. McCormick, frowning, was booking messages at her high desk. She hung her hat in the cabinet and took the pen from his hand.
"Well, Little Bright-eyes, welcome to our city!" he exclaimed in his usual manner, but she saw that he was nervous, disturbed by the sense of tension in the air.
"After this you're going to call me Miss Davies," she said, folding a message into an envelope. She struck the bell for the next messenger-boy. Well, she had been able to do that.
It was harder to approach Mr. Roberts. She did not know whether she most shrank from him, despised him, or feared him, but her heart fluttered and she felt ill when he came through the railing into the office and sat down at his desk. She went over the day's bookings, and checked up the messenger books without seeing them, until her hatred of her cowardice grew into a kind of courage. Then she went over to his desk.
"Mr. Roberts," she said clearly. "I'm not any of the things you called me." Her cheeks, her forehead, even her neck, were burning painfully. "I'm a perfectly decent girl."
"Well, there's no use making such a fuss about it," he mumbled, searching among his papers for one which apparently was not there.
"I wouldn't stay, only I owe you ten dollars and I've got to have a job. You know that. It was all the truth I told you, about having to work. I got to stay here—"
"How do you know I'm going to let you?" he said, stung.
"I'm a good clerk. You can't get another as good any cheaper." She found herself on the defensive and struck wildly. "You ought to anyway let me keep the job, to make up—"