“I’m not ready yet,” she announced half to herself.
“You’re a bad example,” he caressed her with bluff words, “of Southern indolence.”
“I’m a New Yorker,” she said and went back to her girls.
Always she knew this could not last. Yet always life came easier, easier ... in its harsh brusque work, in its biting flavor of intercourse with Mr. Johns, with Clara.
Each night as she lay down to sleep, the question stood before her: Why? A question like a single point of steel piercing so many lives, piercing so many loves, all bleeding-spitted upon it. But she slept quick. She slept heavy. In her sleep, if it was parted at all, merely the Question again, rising up, up, out of sight like an infinite steel point: she was impaled on it: but bloodless already. She lay there quiet, impaled. She had no responsibility since she was bloodless already. And in the morning, when she awoke there was work.
She entered the Office a breath of wistful quiet, a cloud of gentle moisture moving upon a sultry day. All who were there unthinking were glad, when she entered the Office.
Clara found herself glad when she was with her. In the cooling dusk of summer they walked homeward: at times they dined together: quiet words went from each to each, no depths articulate and yet there was a peace.
Fanny looked at her friend as they ate in silence.
—Know everything! There is naught in me I do not wish you to know. But know it silent. She would have been happy to be of help to Clara.
Summer was a full time in the Sales Office of Delight Drinks Inc. Even so there came pause. Slack hours lounged in the hot rooms. Rooms, writhed in the dry green blare of the electric lights, burning like sores against the summer’s sultry and drab dampness, came to a halt, jolted against their usual flow, stood glazed and ominous upon the dark grain of Time.