Naturally one would suppose that two persons so full of theoretical wisdom would have applied it, and that in applying it they would have been the happiest and most useful people in all the town; but instead they were probably the most miserable people in town, and Mrs. Martin, whom we knew better than Red, because she once had worked in the office, was forever bemoaning what she called her "lot," though we knew for many years that her "lot" was not the result of the fates against her, but merely the inevitable consequence of her temperament.
Before we put in linotypes and set our type by machinery it was set by girls. Usually we employed half-a-dozen, who came from the town high school. They kept coming and going, as girls do who work in country towns, getting married in their twenties or finding something better than printing, and it is likely that in ten years as many as fifty girls have worked in the office, and be it said to the credit of the girls—which cannot be said of so many of the boys and men who have worked in the shop—that they were girls we were proud of—all but Ethelwylde Swaney.
She that we called the Princess worked in the office less than two years, but the memory of her still lingers, though hardly could one say like "the scent of the roses"; for the Princess was not merely a poor compositor, she was the kind that would make mistakes and blame others for them, and that kind never learns. Though she ran away to marry Red Martin—which was her own mistake—this habit of blaming others for her faults was so strong that she never forgave her mother for making the match. We know in our office that Mrs. Swaney did not dream that the girl was even going with Red Martin until they were married. Yet the Martin neighbours for twenty years have blamed Mrs. Swaney. When the Princess was in the office we found out that the truth wasn't in her; also we discovered that she was lazy and that she cried too easily. Right at the busy hour in the afternoon we used to catch her with a type in her fingers and her hand poised in the air, looking off into space for a minute at a time, and when we spoke to her she would put her head on her case and cry softly; and the foreman would have to apologise before she would go back to work. Even then she would have to take the broken piece of looking-glass that she kept in her capital "K" box and make an elaborate toilet before settling down. Moreover, though she was only seventeen, much of the foreman's time was spent chasing dirty-faced little boys away from her case, and if some boy didn't have his elbow in her quad box, she was off her stool visiting either with some other girl, or standing by the stove drying her hands—she was eternally drying her hands—and talking to one of the men. In all the year and a half that she was in the office the Princess never learned how to help herself. When she had to dump her type, she had to call some man from his work to help her—and then there would be more conversation.
But we kept her and were patient with her on account of her father, John Swaney, a hard-working man who was trying to make something of the Princess, so we put up with her perfumery and her powder rags and her royal airs, and did all we could to teach her the difference between a comma and a period—though she never really learned; and we were still patient with her, even when she deliberately pied a lot of type after being corrected for some piece of carelessness or worse. We made due allowances for the Rutherford temper, which her father warned us not to arouse. Nevertheless, her mother came to the office one winter day in her black straw hat with a veil around it, and with the coat she had worn for ten years, to tell us that she was afraid working in the shop would hurt her daughter's social standing. So the Princess walked out that night in a gust of musk—in her picture hat and sweeping cloak, with bangles tinkling and petticoat swishing—and the office knew her no more forever.
About the time that the Princess left the office to improve her social standing, Eli Martin and his big mule team came to town from the Bethel neighbourhood. He was as likely a looking red-headed country boy as you ever saw. We were laying the town waterworks pipes that year, and Eli and his team had work all summer. On the street he towered above the other men several inches in height, and he looked big and muscular and masculine in his striped undershirt and blue overalls, as he worked with his team in the hot sun. Of course, the Princess would not have seen him in those days. Her nose was seeking a higher social level, and the clerks in the White Front dry-goods store formed the pinnacle of her social ideal. But Eli Martin was naturally what in our parlance we call a ladies' man, and he was not long in learning that the wide-brimmed black hat, the ready-made faded green suit and the red string necktie which had swept the girls down before him in the Bethel neighbourhood would accomplish little in town. So when winter came, and work with his team was hard to get, he sold his mules and bedecked himself in fine linen. He had a few hundred dollars saved up, so he lived in the cabbage smells of the Astor House, and fancied that he was enjoying the refinements of a great city. Time hung heavily upon him, and at night he joined the switchmen and certain young men of leisure in the town in a more or less friendly game of poker in the rooms at the head of the dark stairway on South Main Street.
When spring came the young man had no desire and little need to go back to work, for by that time he was known as Lucky Red. In a year the sunburn left him and he grew white and thin. He went to Kansas City for a season, and became known among gamblers as far west as Denver; but he was only a tin-horn gambler in the big cities, while in our town he was at the head of his profession, so he came back and opened a room of his own. He came back in a blaze of glory; to wit: a long grey frock coat with trousers to match, pleated white shirts studded with blinding diamonds, a small white hat dented jauntily on three sides, a matted lump of red hair on the back of his head and a dashing red curl combed extravagantly low on his forehead. Before he left town for his foreign tour Red Martin used to hang about the churches Sunday evenings, peering through the blinds and making eyes at the girls; but upon his return he had risen to another social level. He had acquired a cart with red wheels and a three-minute horse; so he dropped from his social list the girls who "worked out" and made eyes at those young women who lived at home, gadding around town evenings, picking up boys on the street and forever talking about their "latest."
It was the most natural thing in the world that Red and the Princess should find each other, and six months before the elopement we heard that the Princess was riding about the country with him in the red-wheeled cart. For after she left the office in one way and another we had kept track of the girl—sometimes through her father, who, being a carpenter, was frequently called to the office to fix up a door or a window; sometimes through the other girls in the office, and sometimes through Alphabetical Morrison, whose big family of girl school-teachers made him a storage battery of social information.
It seems that the Rutherford temper developed in the Princess as she grew older. Mrs. Swaney was Juanita Sinclair; her father was a mild-mannered little man, who went out of doors to cough, but her mother was a Rutherford—a big, stiff-necked, beer-bottle-shaped woman, who bossed the missionary society until she divided the church. John Swaney, who is not a talkative man, once got in a crowd at Smith's cigar-store where they were telling ghost stories, and his contribution to the horror of the occasion was a relating of how, when they were fooling with tables, trying to make them tip at his house one night at a family reunion, the spirit of Grandma Rutherford appeared, split the table into kindling, dislocated three shoulder-blades and sprained five wrists. It was this Rutherford temper that the Princess wore when she slouched around the house in her mother-hubbard with her hair in papers. The girls in the office used to say that if her mother over-cooked the Princess's egg in the morning she would rise grandly from the breakfast table, tipping over her chair behind her, and rush to her room "to have a good cry," and the whole family had to let the breakfast cool while they coaxed her down. That was the Rutherford temper. Also, when they tried to teach her to cook, it was the Rutherford temper that broke the dishes. Colonel Morrison once told us that when the Princess thought it was time to give a party, the neighbours could see the Rutherford temper begin wig-wagging at the world through the Princess's proud head, and there was nothing for her father to do but to kill the chickens, run errands all day to the grocery store, and sit in the cellar freezing cream, and then go to the barn at night to smoke. It was known in the neighbourhood that the Princess dragged her shoestrings until noon, and that her bed was never in the memory of woman made up in the daytime. We are Yankees in our town, and these things made more talk to the girl's discredit than the story that she was keeping company with Red Martin!
But we at the office saw in the proud creature that passed our window so grandly nothing to indicate her real self. The year that Red Martin came back to town the Princess used to turn into Main Street in an afternoon, wearing the big black hat that cost her father a week's hard work, looking as sweet as a jug of sorghum and as smiling as a basket of chips. Though women sniffed at her, the men on the veranda of the Hotel Metropole craned their necks to watch her out of sight. She jingled with chains and watches and lockets and chatelaines, carried more rings than a cane rack, and walked with the air of the heroine of the society drama at the opera house. When she was on parade she never even glanced toward our office, where she had jeopardised her social position. She barely quivered a recognising eye-brow at the girls who had worked with her, and they had their laugh at her, so matters were about even. But the office girls say that, after the Princess eloped with Red Martin, she was glad to rush up and shake hands with them. For we know in our town that the princess business does not last more than ten days or two weeks after marriage; it is a trade of quick sales, short seasons and small profits. The day that the elopement was the talk of the town, Colonel Alphabetical Morrison was in the office. He said that he remembered Juanita Sinclair when she was a princess and wore Dolly Varden clothes and was the playfullest kitten in the basketful that used to turn out to the platform dances on Fourth of July, and appear as belles of the suppers given for the Silver Cornet Band just after the war. "But," added the Colonel, "this town is full of saffron-coloured old girls with wiry hair and sun-bleached eyes, who at one time or another were in the princess business. Not only has every dog his day, but eventually every kitten becomes a cat."