She was earning her living. While Lois lolled at teas, and waited for her début. Earning one’s bread—David knew what that meant, in the world. It meant the heights and the depths. It meant nobility. The man who earned his bread was a man: the man who did not was less than a woman.... Did it really mean these things?
He had earned his living since he was fifteen years old. For five years done this; for five years thought nothing about it, thought nothing about the world. That was strange. He had loafed three weeks near an idle lake and a world was born. Was earning one’s bread perhaps a trick of the hand, like placing the spokes in a wheel? What had the droning hours in the shop brought to him? Did he not go out into the breathing fields and watch his mind stir to expand? Until there had been three weeks of this and his mind had expanded. He liked work. Was it perhaps a trifle like a drug that one gets used to, that eases one off from the world? Here he was, juggling with steamship deliveries and tinkering accounts. Brainier work than welding handle-bars? Life could not be this. Perhaps this wise woman who earned her living did not know life after all.
At least, she did not know him. She had bored him: she was boring him now. David felt he knew her somewhat. He was not boring her....
“It has been such fun, Mr. Markand. After all, we can’t get along, can we, without fresh points of view? They mean success in business. Not plodding counts, you will find: always the fresh point of view....”
Her judgments were cleaner-cut than his. A rubber-stamp is dear. What lay, in truth, behind the patter of her phrases: “France is corrupt but clever.” “People vote according to picnics and catchwords.” “After all, there is something clean, something big which America stands for, that no other country can rival”?
Lois also had her occupation. She received no salary for it: she was apprenticed to it still. She would get her place in the world, if she pursued it well. It too would mean money and ease and position. She too was going through a trick that was far from the free winds of living. Did not both these women belong to Deane and Company?
He loved Lois. He said to himself he loved her. This woman he did not love. So he saw her clearly. Let him swing this clear-seeing back into the dim place of his heart that hurt! It was impossible. He could not diminish Lois after all. The result of his effort was to dispose him more pleasantly toward Miss Lord. Here he was smiling at her with a new attention that a less wise woman might have been wise enough to mistrust....
He came away with a gnawing sense of doubt. He was heart-sick more deeply than ever. Miss Lord and his cousin were creatures of a single world. They performed different parts of a single service. Both of them were supposed to uphold the prestige of this system that made money and spent it: to submit to its standards of deed and thought, to further its dominions. For this, Miss Lord had her wages, Lois her keep.
He too! He too had been taken in for service! For service rendered he too would receive the means of sustaining life. David had seen a coat-of-arms heralding a strange device on the façade of a great commercial building. It had puzzled him. He had forgotten it. Now he recalled it and understood it. He marveled at its telling word. It had said: “Spend me and defend me.”