“You will excuse me, Mr. Babcock?”
“Certainly.”
“I shall be engaged only a moment.”
The discreet Mr. Babcock withdrew, and the head of the firm, with a glance at the heap of letters still untouched, turned, without rising, toward the door. There was a curious expression on his face, the expression of a man who feels himself at last in a position to cut knots, who knows that he commands the situation. A person who might choose to break in on such a weighty conference this morning need not be surprised at summary treatment. And as the woman entered and softly closed the door he leaned a little forward and drew his brows together, his whole appearance saying plainly: “My time is short, madam. Speak to the point.”
The woman faltered and waited for his question. He said not a word. She started to speak, but seemed unable to break through this heavy silence. He waited, his brows coming down more and more. And at last, when the words did pass her lips, they were not at all what she had meant to say.
“I have tried not to come to you again. God knows how it hurts me. But I had to come. I was turned out of the New York Store ten days ago, without warning.”
Once started, she was finding it a little easier to go on; but Mr. Bigelow, carrying the weight of millions on his shoulders, dealing hourly with questions of importance, greater or less, to the whole commercial world, had no time now—kind as he may have been in the more leisurely past—to waste on trivial matters. He had given the woman a chance; was he to blame for her failure? Did “not potential success exist within every human being? Was any man to blame for the shipwreck of another?
“I know nothing about that,” he cut in shortly and finally. “There is no use in bringing your story here.”
She quailed before him. “But I have a right—the law——”
“The law is yours to use. If you think it will help you, use it.” He rose, opened the door, and bowed her out. And she, baffled, humiliated, at the end of her resources, went out without a word, crossed the hall as steadily as any young stenographer, stepped into the elevator with a composed face, and out into the street—and all this while there was nothing to mark her out from a thousand other ill-dressed women; nothing to show that her hopes were gone; simply a plain woman on La Salle Street, quietly walking—where? Where could she walk now? Were there still depths to sound, or had she reached the bottom?