The Wall Street Girl Part 23

"What will you charge for making up this?"

"But you have long had an account with us!" he exclaimed. "Here is something here, Mr. Pendleton,--an exclusive weave."

"No," answered Don firmly; "I don't want that. But this other--you said you'd make that for how much?"

Graustein appeared injured. He waved his hand carelessly.

"Eighty dollars," he replied. "You really need two more, and I'll make the three for two hundred."

"Thanks. I will tell you when to go ahead."

"We like to have plenty of time on your work, Mr. Pendleton," said Graustein.

Two hundred dollars! Once upon the street again, Don caught his breath. His bill at Graustein's had often amounted to three times that, but it had not then come out of a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. Without extra expenses he seldom had more than a dollar left on Sat.u.r.day. By the strictest economy, he figured, it might be possible to save five. To pay a bill of two hundred dollars would at that rate require forty working weeks. By then the clothes would be worn out.

It was facts like these that brought home to Don how little he was earning, and that made that ten-thousand-dollar salary appear like an actual necessity. It was facts like these that helped him to hold on.

But it was also facts like these that called his attention to this matter of cost in other directions. Within the next two months, one item after another of his daily life became reduced to figures, until he lived in a world fairly bristling with price-tags. Collars were so much apiece, cravats so much apiece, waistcoats and shoes and hats so much. As he pa.s.sed store windows the price-tags were the first thing he saw. It seemed that everything was labeled, even such articles of common household use as bed-linen, chairs and tables, carpets and draperies. When they were not, he entered and asked the prices. It became a pa.s.sion with him to learn the cost of things.

It was toward the middle of May that Frances first mentioned a possible trip abroad that summer.

"Dolly Seagraves is going, and wishes me to go with her," she announced.

"It will take a lot of money," he said.

"What do you mean, Don?"

One idle evening he had figured the cost of the wedding trip they had proposed. He estimated it at three years' salary.

"Well, the tickets and hotel bills--" he began.

"But, Don, dear," she protested mildly, "I don't expect you to pay my expenses."

"I wish to Heavens I could, and go with you!"

"We had planned on June, hadn't we?" she smiled.

"On June," he nodded.

She patted his arm.

"Dear old Don! Well, I think a fall wedding would be nicer, anyway.

And Dolly has an English cousin or something who may have us introduced at court. What do you think of that?"

"I'd rather have you right here. I thought after the season here I might be able to see more of you."

"Nonsense! You don't think we'd stay in town all summer? Don, dear, I think you're getting a little selfish."

"Well, you'd be in town part of the summer."

She shook her head.

"We shall sail early, in order to have some gowns made. But if you could meet us there for a few weeks--you do have a vacation, don't you?"

"Two weeks, I think."

"Oh, dear, then you can't."

"Holy smoke, do you know what a first-cla.s.s pa.s.sage costs?"

"I don't want to know. Then you couldn't go, anyway, could you?"

"Hardly."

"Shall you miss me?"

"Yes."

"That will be nice, and I shall send you a card every day."

"Good Heavens!" he exclaimed. "If your father would only go broke before then. If only he would!"

Stuyvesant did not go broke, and Frances sailed on the first of June. Don went to the boat to see her off, and the band on the deck played tunes that brought lumps to his throat. Then the hoa.r.s.e whistle boomed huskily, and from the Hoboken sheds he watched her until she faded into nothing but a speck of waving white handkerchief. In twenty minutes he was back again in the office of Carter, Rand & Seagraves--back again to sheets of little figures with dollar signs before them. These he read off to Speyer, who in turn pressed the proper keys on the adding-machine--an endless, tedious, irritating task. The figures ran to hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands.

Nothing could have been more uninteresting, nothing more meaningless.

He could not even visualize the sums as money. It was like adding so many columns of the letter "s." And yet, it was the accident of an unfair distribution of these same dollar signs that accounted for the fact that Frances was now sailing out of New York harbor, while he remained here before this desk.

They represented the week's purchase of bonds, and if the name "Pendleton, Jr.," had appeared at the head of any of the accounts he might have been by her side.

Something seemed wrong about that. Had she been a steam yacht he could have understood it. Much as he might have desired a steam yacht, he would have accepted cheerfully the fact that he did not have the wherewithal to purchase it. He would have felt no sense of injustice.

But it scarcely seemed decent to consider Frances from this point of view, though a certain parallel could be drawn: her clean-cut lines, her nicety of finish, a certain air of silver and mahogany about her, affording a basis of comparison; but this was from the purely artistic side. One couldn't very well go further and estimate the relative initial cost and amount for upkeep without doing the girl an injustice. After all, there was a distinction between a gasolene engine and a heart, no matter how close an a.n.a.logy physicians might draw.

And yet, the only reason he was not now with her was solely a detail of bookkeeping. It was a matter of such fundamental inconsequence as the amount of his salary. He was separated from her by a single cipher.

But that cipher had nothing whatever to do with his regard for her. It had played no part in his first meeting with her, or in the subsequent meetings, when frank admiration had developed into an ardent attachment. It had nothing to do with the girl herself, as he had seen her for the moment he succeeded in isolating her in a corner of the upper deck before she sailed. It had nothing to do with certain moments at the piano when she sang for him. It had nothing to do with her eyes, as he had seen them that night she had consented to marry him. To be sure, these were only detached moments which were not granted him often; but he had a conviction that they stood for something deeper in her than the everyday moments.

CHAPTER XVI

A MEMORANDUM

During that next week Don found a great deal of time in which to think. He was surprised at how much time he had. It was as if the hours in the day were doubled. Where before he seldom had more than time to hurry home and dress for his evening engagements, he now found that, even when he walked home, he was left with four or five idle hours on his hands.

If a man is awake and hasn't anything else to do, he must think. He began by thinking about Frances, and wondering what she was doing, until young Schuyler intruded himself,--Schuyler, as it happened, had taken the same boat, having been sent abroad to convalesce from typhoid,--and after that there was not much satisfaction in wondering what she was doing. He knew how sympathetic Frances was, and how good she would be to Schuyler under these circ.u.mstances. Not that he mistrusted her in the least--she was not the kind to lose her head and forget. But, at the same time, it did not make him feel any the less lonesome to picture them basking in the sun on the deck of a liner while he was adding innumerable little figures beneath an electric light in the rear of the cas.h.i.+er's cage in a downtown office.

It did not do him any good whatever.