Marie Louise thought to restore Abbie’s spirits a little by saying that she herself was coming down to work and to live in one of those very shanties. But Abbie gave her up as hopeless. Why any one should want to leave a house like what Mamise had, and money in the bank, and no call to lift her hand for nothing except to ring a bell and get somebody to fetch anything, and leave all that and live like a squatter and actually work––well, it did beat all how foolish some folks could be in the world nowadays.
Marie Louise left Abbie and Jake to establish themselves. She had to get back to Washington. Davidge had planned to go with her, but a long-distance telephone-call, and a visit from a group of prospective strikers, and a warning that a consignment of long-expected machinery had not yet arrived, took him out of the car. He was tempted to go with Marie Louise, anyway, but she begged him not to neglect his business 186 for her unimportant self, and bade him good-by in an old Wakefield phrase, “If I don’t see you again, hello!”
She returned to Washington alone, but not lonely. Her thoughts smoked through her brain like a dust-cloud of shining particles, each radiant atom a great idea. The road home was through the sky; the villages and groves were vague pink clouds; the long downward slopes were shafts of sunlight, the ridges rainbows.
It would take her hardly any time to conquer the mysteries of stenography. Surely they must be easy, considering some of the people that practised the art. She would study ship-building, and drafting, too. Her water-color landscapes had been highly praised by certain young men and old ladies in England. She would learn how to keep her own bank-account and revamp her arithmetic. She would take up light bookkeeping; and she would build up her strength in a gymnasium so that she could swing a sledge as well as the next one. She would offer her home in Washington for rent. With the mobs pouring in, it would not be untenanted long.
Her last expectation was realized first. The morning after she reached home she visited Mr. Hailstorks and told him she would sublet her mansion. Now that she wanted to collect rent from it instead of paying rent for it her description of its advantages was inevitably altered. With perfect sincerity she described its very faults as attractions.
Thereafter her life was made miserable by the calls of people who wanted to look the place over. She had incessant offers, but she would not surrender her nest till she was ready to go back to the shipyard, and that was always to-morrow––the movable to-morrow which like the horizon is always just beyond.
She sent herself to school and was dazed by her ignorance. In arithmetic she had forgotten what she had gained at the age of ten, and it was not easy to recapture it.
On the typewriter she had to learn the alphabet all over again in a new order, and this was fiendishly hard. She studied the touch-system with the keyboard covered, and her blunders were disheartening. Her deft fingers seemed hardly to be her own. They would not obey her will at all.
Shorthand was baffling. It took her five times as long to write in shorthand as in longhand such thrilling literature 187 as: “Dear customer,––Letter received and contents noted. In reply to same would say––”
At first she was a trifle snobbish and stand-offish with some of the pert young fellow-pupils, but before long her opinion of them increased to a respect verging on awe.