“How can one secure happiness?” Lucile asked the question almost wistfully. She was over-tired and not a little perplexed.
“There’s a lot of things that go with making people happy,” said Laurie as his nimble fingers flew from book to book. “I’m quite sure that happiness does not come from long hours in a ball-room nor from smoking cigarettes, nor any one of the many things that put dark rings about the eyes of our young new rich or near rich, and that set their eyelids twitching.
“Happiness,” he mused, throwing back his head and laughing softly. “Why, it’s as easy to be happy as it is to tell the truth. Have friends and be true to them. Find a place you love to be and be there. Keep your body and mind fit. Sleep eight hours; eat slowly; take two hours for quiet thinking every day. Have a crowd you love, a crowd you feel that you belong to and fit in with. Of course they’ll not be perfect. None of us are. But loveable they are, all the same.
“For instance, take the crowd here,” he said, lowering his voice. “You and I are transients here. Christmas eve comes and out we go. But look at Donnie and Rennie, Bob, Bettie, and dear old Morrison over there in the corner. They’re the regular ones, been here for years, all of them.
“See here,” he continued earnestly, “I’ll bet that when you came in here you had the popular magazine notion of the people who work in department stores; slang of the worst kind, paint an inch thick, lip stick, sordid jealousy, envy, no love, no fellowship. But look! What would happen if Rennie, the dear mother and straw-boss of us all, should slip before a car and be seriously injured to-night? What would happen? Not a soul of us all, even us transients, but would dig down and give our last penny to buy the things that would help her bear it. That’s what I mean, a gang that you belong to, that you suffer with, endure things with and enjoy life with! That’s the big secret of happiness.”
As Lucile listened to this short lecture on happiness, she worked. At last her task was done. Then with a hurried: “Thanks awfully. Goodnight,” she rushed for the cloak-room preparatory to donning the fur-lined cape. She half expected to find it gone, but it was not, and after throwing it across her shoulders she dashed down the stairs to join the homeward rushing throng.
As she snuggled down beneath the covers that night, she found her mind dwelling with unusually intense interest upon the events of the past two days. Like pictures on a screen, strange, unanswerable questions passed through her mind. Who was the mystery woman of the night shadows in the book department? Why had Laurie given her his pass-out? Why had she left her gorgeously beautiful cape behind for a shop girl to wear home? How had the unusual crimson thread come to be drawn into the cloth of the cape? Had the mystery woman put it there? Had she drawn that thread through the page of Lucile’s cash book? It seemed that she must have. But why? Why? Why? This last word kept ringing in her ears. Why had Laurie given up his pass-out? Where had he slept that night? How did it happen that an elevator in a department store at night ran of its own accord with no one to work the lever? Surely here were problems enough to keep one small brain busy.
Then again, there was the problem of the missing author of that wonderfully successful book. What did Laurie know about that? Why had he talked so strangely about it?
When she had allowed all these problems to pass in review before her mind’s eye, she came to but one conclusion—that she would believe Laurie a sincere and trustworthy person until he had been proven otherwise. Her faith had been shaken a bit by the revelation of the night before.
“Life,” she whispered sleepily to herself, “is certainly strange. Surely one who can talk so wonderfully about happiness can’t be bad. And yet it’s all very mysterious.”