By the end of two years Moira had repaid the last of the five
hundred with which she had possessed herself on leaving Thornhill;
and accumulated a surplus of her own. From the day she quitted the
Munson School of Stenography and Typewriting she had never experienced
difficulty in securing a job and in making an excellent impression. The
two changes which she had made were of her own volition. For more than
six months now she had been secretary to the executive vice-president
of a soap company and had become something of an executive herself, on
a salary that still had a good margin in which to grow.
This man was typical of the average young organizing and selling marvel
of the day, but he had a quality of intelligence in matters outside of
business--limited, yet enough to be refreshing after the others she had
encountered. Moira did not feel, as she had in other places, that she
must suppress all the evidences of her breeding and education. This
she had actually attempted to do hitherto; diplomatically ignoring
awkward and ungrammatical English, adopting as much slang as she could
retain without practice on the outside, and generally pretending to be
quite as much the low brow as most of the other girls whose chatter
bewildered her in the washroom.
With Barcroft, for the first time, she could permit herself to be
natural, and this sense of ease increased her value enormously in
“meeting the trade” and handling difficult people in his absence. She
checked him up on his errors of dictation without shame, but she had
the rare good sense to know just when he was wiser in being wrong.
She grew to respect, rather than disdain, the qualities that made men
successful in business. They were qualities that did not interest her
essentially, yet Barcroft’s mind had mysterious powers of insight that
often called for silent applause.
Their relations developed into friendliness, and she felt his honest
admiration without the fear that it would lead to complications. She
had never yet herself encountered the boss-turned-lover--and the case
was reputed to be so common that she felt far from flattered. She tried
to account for it on the score of her natural dignity, her quiet mode
of dressing, her application to work, and her reticence; but these did
not explain. She was not conspicuously dignified--when it seemed to her
good to laugh she did so. Nor did she dress unattractively, much as she
respected her budget. And her efficiency was not nearly so obtrusive
as some brands of it she had observed. Moreover these qualities, she
believed, in a young and good-looking woman, would only make her more
pleasing to men. She mocked at the whole business; it was another of
those favourite American panics, like the white slave traffic, the
German spy-hunt, and the innumerable other horrors that supported the
newspapers and bred the violence of mobs.
She congratulated herself, nevertheless, that in spite of Barcroft’s
understanding and deference, nothing of that sort was remotely likely
to happen. She had found a good post, agreeably within her powers and
therefore easy, and she would be able to keep it indefinitely, with the
hope of a steadily mounting salary. Then one evening they fell into a
conversation after office hours. It ranged everywhere from the staging
of Arthur Hopkins to the value of rotogravure as an advertising medium,
from the proper length of skirts to the latest novel, and Barcroft
broke into the discussion suddenly by making love to her. He too was a
victim, as it appeared, of the quarrelsome and haphazard home.
She had often asked herself, with some bitterness, what advantage her
early life gave her in such a career as she now had to follow. She
found it in this instance the most useful equipment she could have.
Another girl would have thrown up the job. She managed adroitly to save
it. She was not at all shocked by Barcroft’s love-making. She felt
sorry for him; she talked to him sympathetically about his troubles,
and in the end they were better friends than ever. Moreover, he was not
long afterward grateful to her ... the wife had come out victor over
her lord ... the yoke was again pleasing to his neck.
Her life outside of the office was so devoid of romance that this brush
with it at the soap company was not unpleasant. She had occupied more
than one furnished room since the start at Mrs. McCabe’s, and in her
wanderings she had come necessarily in contact with the Village life,
but she did not adopt its easy associations. She discovered very early
that the Village was the gossip shop of the country. National--and
international--news travelled fast there from tongue to tongue,
concerning people even slightly known or connected with the known. You
could not say when you would walk into one of its restaurants and find
at the next table a prominent matron of your city. A half a dozen times
she had dodged or stared down old acquaintances on the upper Avenue.
There were girls she met from day to day, willing to become her
friends--attractive girls who were doing interesting things. A few
good cronies of this sort would have lightened her solitary evenings
and perhaps helped her to find work more congenial than business. But
friendships, to be worth while, had to be frank. She knew she would be
tempted defiantly to tell all about herself, and she shrank from doing
so. Native resourcefulness made it easy to draw the line of separation,
but pride made it hard. She realized that her aloofness was causing
criticism. In the two restaurants where she took most of her evening
meals--because they were cheap and clean--the talk was not sympathetic.
If one was free to have lovers _ad lib._ in the Village one was
obviously not free to dispense with friends entirely. She seemed a snob.
There were times when she gave herself up to storms of grief. It
grew to be an act of self-preservation, a part of her philosophy of
endurance. Long spells of weeping, or of a weary, helpless state of
the spirit that was more thoroughly a surrender and resignation than
tears. Again and again she would cry through the darkness for Hal
with the plaintive voice of a sick child--and even for the kind ghost
of Mathilda Seymour. If she felt ashamed of these indulgences, she
argued that there could be no harm in them. Her old friends could not
hear her. She was alone in all those little rooms, completely cut off
from anything familiar, from all but the fluttering, unreal, poignant
memories of her beautiful childhood. Waves of passionate self-pity
swept over her; she rebelled aloud against the bitter meanness of her
betrayal; the awful burden of carrying her secret alone.
In the end it was wise that she did not deny these moods when they
came to her and did not try to control them. From them she rose
calm and clear-headed, charged with newly stored courage. They were
spiritual baths, which cleaned her, a sort of self-asserting prayer.
When they had gone not a vestige of rebellion was left in her; she felt
grown in stature, ready to carry her fate like a flag. For a day or two
afterward she would be sentimental and overfull of feeling. She would
go out of her way to help beggars and walk a block to give dimes to
the hurdy-gurdy man; and comfort the little girls in the filing room
if they weren’t feeling well, or had just been called down by the head
clerk.
One thing that these rituals of solitary suffering gave her was the
buoyant, happy consciousness of artistic power, and she longed to
return to painting. Until now it had seemed impossible. She could
not command the space, the office robbed her of daylight, materials
were too costly. Now she began to dream of creating a studio--the
opportunity to work might be managed somehow, once she had acquired
the facilities. She saved more sedulously, giving up a part of
her pleasures, an occasional new book and a theatre now and then,
furbishing clothes for herself despite her hatred of the needle.