In February her mother wrote and asked for more money.
Old Nell died last week. Tommy found her dead in the pasture when he went to get the cows. We will have to have a new horse for the spring plowing, and your father has found a good six-year-old, blind in one eye, that we can get cheap. We will have to have sixty dollars, and if you can spare it, it will come in very handy. We would pay you back later. I would not ask you for it only you are making a good salary, and I would rather get it from you than from the bank. It would be only a loan, for I would not ask you to give it to us. If you can let us have it, please let me know right away.
She had saved thirty dollars and had just drawn her half-month's pay. Momma would gladly wait for her share of the month's expenses. As soon as she was through work she went to the post-office and got a money-order for sixty dollars. She felt a fierce pride in being able to do it, and she was glad to know that she was helping at home, but there was rage in her heart.
It seemed to her that fate was against her, that she would go on working forever, and never get anything she wanted. She saw weeks and months and years of work stretching ahead of her like the interminable series of ties in a railroad track, vanishing in as barren a perspective.
For nearly three years her whole life had been work. Those few evenings at the cafés had been her only gaiety. She had copied innumerable market quotations, sent uncounted messages, been a mere machine, and for what? She did not want to work, she wanted to live.
That night she went to the beach with the crowd. Bob was there and Duddy and a score of others she had met in cafés. There again was the stir of shifting colors under brilliant lights, the eddy and swirl of dancers, sparkling eyes, white hands, a glimmer of rings, perfume, laughter, and through it all the music, throbbing, swaying, blending all sensations into one quickening rhythm, one exhilarating vibration of nerves and spirit. Helen felt weariness slip from her shoulders; she felt that she was soaring like a lark; she could have burst into song.
She danced. She danced eagerly, joyously, carried by the music as by the crest of a wave. Repartee slipped from her lips as readily as from Louise's; she found that it did not matter what one said, only that one said it quickly; her sallies were met by applauding laughter. In the automobile, dashing from place to place, she took off her hat and, facing the rushing wind, sang aloud for pure joy.
They encountered Gilbert Kennedy just after midnight. She turned a flushed, radiant face to him when he came over to their table. She felt sure of herself, ready for anything. He leaned past her to shake hands with momma, who greeted him in chorus with Louise.
"Back in our midst once more!" he said to Helen over his shoulder. He brought up a chair beside hers, and she saw in his first glance that he was tired and moody. She felt the lessening of his magnetic vitality; it seemed to have drained away through some inner lesion. He ordered straight Scotch and snapped his fingers impatiently until the waiter brought it.
"Who you with, Bert? Didn't see your car outside," said Duddy.