The Grain of Dust Part 8

His embarra.s.sment increased. It was a novel sensation to him, this feeling ill at ease with a woman--he who was at ease with everyone and put others at their ease or not as he pleased. "I'm sorry you and Miss Burroughs didn't arrange something. I suppose she found the hours difficult."

"She made me an offer," replied the girl. "I refused it."

"But, as I told you, we can let you off--anything within reason."

"Thank you, but I do not care to do that kind of work. No doubt any kind of work for wages cla.s.ses one as a servant. But those people up there--they make one _feel_ it--feel menial."

"Not Miss Burroughs, I a.s.sure you."

A satirical smile hovered round the girl's lips. Her face was altogether lovely now, and no lily ever rose more gracefully from its stem than did her small head from her slender form. "She meant to be kind, but she was insulting. Those people up there don't understand. They're vain and narrow. Oh, I don't blame them. Only, I don't care to be brought into contact with them."

He looked at her in wonder. She talked of Josephine as if she were Josephine's superior, and her expression and accent were such that they contrived to convey an impression that she had the right to do it. He grew suddenly angry at her, at himself for listening to her. "I am sorry," he said stiffly, and took up a pen to indicate that he wished her to go.

He rather expected that she would be alarmed. But if she was, she wholly concealed it. She smiled slightly and moved toward the door. Looking after her, he relented. She seemed so young--was so young--and was evidently poor. He said:

"It's all right to be proud, Miss Hallowell. But there is such a thing as supersensitiveness. You are earning your living. If you'll pardon me for thrusting advice upon you, I think you've made a mistake. I'm sure Miss Burroughs meant well. If you had been less sensitive you'd soon have realized it."

"She patronized me," replied the girl, not angrily, but with amus.e.m.e.nt.

"It was all I could do not to laugh in her face. The idea of a woman who probably couldn't make five dollars a week fancying she was the superior of any girl who makes her own living, no matter how poor a living it is."

Norman laughed. It had often appealed to his own sense of humor, the delusion that the tower one happened to be standing upon was part of one's own stature. But he said: "You're a very foolish young person.

You'll not get far in the world if you keep to that road. It winds through Poverty Swamps to the Poor House."

"Oh, no," replied she. "One can always die."

Again he laughed. "But why die? Why not be sensible and live?"

"I don't know," replied she. She was looking away dreamily, and her eyes were wonderful to see. "There are many things I feel and do--and I don't at all understand why. But--" An expression of startling resolution flashed across her face. "But I do them, just the same."

A brief silence; then, as she again moved toward the door, he said, "You have been working for some time?"

"Four years."

"You support yourself?"

"I work to help out father's income. He makes almost enough, but not quite."

Almost enough! The phrase struck upon Norman's fancy as both amusing and sad. Almost enough for what? For keeping body and soul together; for keeping body barely decently clad. Yet she was content. He said:

"You like to work?"

"Not yet. But I think I shall when I learn this business. One feels secure when one has a trade."

"It doesn't impress me as an interesting life for a girl of your age,"

he suggested.

"Oh, I'm not unhappy. And at home, of evenings and Sundays, I'm happy."

"Doing what?"

"Reading and talking with father and--doing the housework--and all the rest of it."

What a monotonous narrow little life! He wanted to pity her, but somehow he could not. There was no suggestion in her manner that she was an object of pity. "What did Miss Burroughs say to you--if I may ask?"

"Certainly. You sent me, and I'm much obliged to you. I realize it was an opportunity--for another sort of girl. I half tried to accept because I knew refusing was only my--queerness." She smiled charmingly. "You are not offended because I couldn't make myself take it?"

"Not in the least." And all at once he felt that it was true. This girl would have been out of place in service. "What was the offer?"

Suddenly before him there appeared a clever, willful child, full of the childish pa.s.sion for imitation and mockery. And she proceeded to "take off" the grand Miss Burroughs--enough like Josephine to give the satire point and barb. He could see Josephine resolved to be affable and equal, to make this doubtless bedazzled stray from the "lower cla.s.ses" feel comfortable in those palatial surroundings. She imitated Josephine's walk, her way of looking, her voice for the menials--gracious and condescending. The exhibition was clever, free from malice, redolent of humor. Norman laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks.

"You ought to go on the stage," said he. "How Josephine--Miss Burroughs would appreciate it! For she's got a keen sense of humor."

"Not for the real jokes--like herself," replied Miss Hallowell.

"You're prejudiced."

"No. I see her as she is. Probably everyone else--those around her--see her money and her clothes and all that. But I saw--just her."

He nodded thoughtfully. Then he looked penetratingly at her. "How did you happen to learn to do that?" he asked. "To see people as they are?"

"Father taught me." Her eyes lighted up, her whole expression changed.

She became beautiful with the beauty of an intense and adoring love.

"Father is a wonderful man--one of the most wonderful that ever lived.

He----"

There was a knock at the door. She startled, he looked confused. Both awakened to a sense of their forgotten surroundings, of who and what they were. She went and Mr. Sanders entered. But even in his confusion Norman marveled at the vanis.h.i.+ng of the fascinating personality who had been captivating him into forgetting everything else, at the reappearance of the blank, the pale and insignificant personality attached to a typewriting machine at ten dollars a week. No, not insignificant, not blank--never again that, for him. He saw now the full reality--and also why he, everyone, was so misled. She made him think of the surface of the sea when the sky is gray and the air calm. It lies smooth and flat and expressionless--inert, monotonous. But let sunbeam strike or breeze ever so faint start up, and what a commotion of unending variety! He could never look at her again without being reminded of those infinite latent possibilities, without wondering what new and perhaps more charming, more surprising varieties of look and tone and manner could be evoked.

And while Sanders was talking--prosing on and on about things Norman either already knew or did not wish to know--he was thinking of her. "If she happens to meet a man with enough discernment to fall in love with her," he said to himself, "he certainly will never weary. What a pity that such a girl shouldn't have had a chance, should be wasted on some unappreciative chucklehead of her cla.s.s! What a pity she hasn't ambition--or the quality, whatever it is--that makes those who have it get on, whether they wish or no."

During the rest of the day he revolved from time to time indistinct ideas of somehow giving this girl a chance. He wished Josephine would and could help, or perhaps his sister Ursula. It was not a matter that could be settled, or even taken up, in haste. No man of his mentality and experience fails to learn how perilous it is in the least to interfere in the destiny of anyone. And his notion involved not slight interference with advice or suggestion or momentarily extended helping hand, but radical change of the whole current of destiny. Also, he appreciated how difficult it is for a man to do anything for a young woman--anything that would not harm more than it would help. Only one thing seemed clear to him--the "clever child" ought to have a chance.

He went to see Josephine after dinner that night His own house, while richly and showily furnished, as became his means and station, seemed--and indeed was--merely an example of simple, old-fas.h.i.+oned "solid comfort" in comparison with the Burroughs palace. He had never liked, but, being a true New Yorker, had greatly admired the splendor of that palace, its costly art junk, its rotten old tapestries, its unlovely genuine antiques, its room after room of tasteless magnificence, suggesting a museum, or rather the combination home and salesroom of an art dealer. This evening he found himself curious, critical, disposed to license a long-suppressed sense of humor. While he was waiting for Josephine to come down to the small salon into which he had been shown, her older sister drifted in, on the way to a late dinner and ball. She eyed him admiringly from head to foot.

"You've _such_ an air, Fred," said she. "You should hear the butler on the subject of you. He says that of all the men who come to the house you are most the man of the world. He says he could tell it by the way you walk in and take off your hat and coat and throw them at him."

Norman laughed and said, "I didn't know. I must stop that."

"Don't!" cried Mrs. Bellowes. "You'll break his heart. He adores it. You know, servants dearly love to be treated as servants. Anyone who thinks the world loves equality knows very little about human nature. Most people love to look up, just as most women love to be ruled. No, you must continue to be the master, the man of the world, Fred."

She was busy with her gorgeous and trailing wraps and with her cigarette or she would have seen his confusion. He was recalling his scene with the typewriter girl. Not much of the man of the world, then and there, certainly. What a grotesque performance for a man of his position, for a serious man of any kind! And how came he to permit such a person to mimic Josephine Burroughs, a lady, the woman to whom he was engaged? In these proud and pretentious surroundings he felt contemptibly guilty--and dazed wonder at his own inexplicable folly and weakness.

Mrs. Bellowes departed before Josephine came down. So there was no relief for his embarra.s.sment. He saw that she too felt constrained.

Instead of meeting him half way in embrace and kiss, as she usually did, she threw him a kiss and pretended to be busy lighting a cigarette and arranging the shades of the table lamp. "Well, I saw your 'poor little creature,'" she began. She was splendidly direct in all her dealings, after the manner of people who have never had to make their own way--to cajole or conciliate or dread the consequences of frankness.

"I told you you'd not find her interesting."

"Oh, she was a nice little girl," replied Josephine with elaborate graciousness--and Norman, the "take off" fresh in his mind, was acutely critical of her manner, of her mannerisms. "Of course," she went on, "one does not expect much of people of that cla.s.s. But I thought her unusually well-mannered--and quite clean."

"Tetlow makes 'em clean up," said Norman, a gleam of sarcasm in his careless glance and tone. And into his nostrils stole an odor of freshness and health and youth, the pure, sweet odor that is the base of all the natural perfumes. It startled him, his vivid memory of a feature of her which he had not been until now aware that he had ever noted.