"The girl is simply too good-looking," said Bunner, the office manager,
in a high, complaining voice. "She is industrious, intelligent,
punctual and well-mannered, but simply too good-looking--a disturbing
element in the office on account of her appearance. I made a grave
mistake in engaging her."
The president, who had been a professor of botany at a great
university before he resigned in order to become head of The Universal
Encyclopedia of Necessary Knowledge Publishing Corporation, was a
trifle deaf, but had not as yet admitted the fact to himself; and he
inquired with the patient, slightly contemptuous surprise of the deaf,
"But I do not understand why she is crying."
"It is not she who is crying," answered the office manager regretfully;
"it is Mr. Rixon, our third vice president. He is crying because he
has most unfortunately become interested in the young woman--fallen in
love with her--so my stenographer tells me."
The president peered through his bifocal lenses. He did not wish to be
thought one of those unsophisticated scientists who understand only the
plain unpsychological process of plants. He inquired whether the girl
had encouraged the third vice president, whether, in a word, she had
given him to understand that she took a deeper interest in him than
was actually the fact, "the disappointment of the discovery being the
direct cause of the emotional outbreak which you have just described."
Bunner hesitated. He would have liked to consider that Miss Leavitt was
to blame, for otherwise the responsibility was entirely his own. In
his heart he believed she was, for he was one of those men who despise
women and yet consider them omnipotent.
"I can't say I've ever seen her do more than say good morning to him,"
he answered rather crossly. "But I believe there is a way of avoiding
a man--with her appearance. You have probably never noticed her, sir,
but----"
"Oh, I've noticed her," said the president, nodding his old head. "I've
noticed a certain youth and exuberant vitality, and--yes, I may say
beauty--decided beauty."
Bunner sighed.
"A girl like that ought to get married," he said. "They ought not
to be working in offices, making trouble. It's hard on young men of
susceptible natures like Mr. Rixon. You can hardly blame him."
No, they agreed they did not blame him at all; and so they decided to
let the young woman have her salary to the first of the month and let
her go immediately.
"That will be best, Bunner," said the president, and dismissed the
matter from his mind.
But Bunner, who knew that there was a possibility that even a beautiful
young woman might not enjoy losing her job, could not dismiss the
matter from his mind until the interview with her was over. He decided,
therefore, to hold it at once, and withdrew from the president's room,
where, as a directors' meeting was about to take place, the members of
the board were already beginning to gather.
Bunner was a pale fat man of forty, who was as cold to the excessive
emotion of the third vice president as he was to the inconvenient
beauty which had caused it. He paused beside Miss Leavitt's desk in the
outer office and requested a moment of her time.
She had finished going over the article on Corals and was about to
begin that on Coronach--a Scotch dirge or lamentation for the dead.
She had just been wondering whether any created being would ever want
to know anything about coronach, when Mr. Bunner spoke to her. If she
had followed her first impulse she would have looked up and beamed at
him, for she was of the most friendly and warmhearted nature; but she
remembered that beaming was not safe where men were concerned--even
when they were fat and forty--so she answered coldly, "Yes, Mr.
Bunner," and rose and followed him to his own little office.
Miss Pearl Leavitt, A. B., Rutland College, was not one of those
beauties who must be pointed out to you before you appreciate their
quality. On the contrary, the eye roving in her neighborhood was
attracted to her as to a luminary. There was nothing finicky or subtle
or fine-drawn about her. Her features were rather large and simple,
like a Greek statue's, though entirely without a statue's immobility.
Her coloring was vivid--a warm brunette complexion, a bright golden
head and a pair of large gray eyes that trembled with their own light
as they fixed themselves upon you, much as the reflection of the
evening star trembles in a quiet pool. But what had always made her
charm, more than her beauty, was her obvious human desire to be a
member of the gang--to enjoy what the crowd enjoyed and do what was
being done. It was agony to her to assume the icy, impassive demeanor
which, since she had been working in offices, she had found necessary.
But she did it. She was hard up.
When Mr. Bunner had sent away his stenographer and shut the door he sat
down and pressed his small fat hands together.
"Miss Leavitt," he said, "I am sorry to be obliged to tell you that
during the summer months when so many of our heads of departments are
away on their vacations, we shall be obliged to reduce our office
staff; and so, though your work has been most satisfactory--we have
no complaint to make of your work--still I am sorry to be obliged to
tell you that during the summer months, when so many of our heads of
departments----"
He did not know what was the matter; the sentence appeared to be a
circular sentence without exits.
Miss Leavitt folded her arms with a rapid whirling motion. Of course,
since the first three words of his sentence she had known that she had
lost her job.
"Just why is it that I am being sent away?" she said.
Sulky children, before they actually burst into tears, have a way
of almost visibly swelling like a storm cloud. It would be wrong to
suggest that anything as lovely as Pearl Leavitt could swell, and yet
there was something of this effect as she stared down at the office
manager. He did not like her tone, nor yet her look.
He said with a sort of acid smile, "I was about to explain the reason
when you interrupted me. Although your work has been perfectly
satisfactory, we feel that during the summer months----" He wrenched
himself away from that sentence entirely. "It is the wish of the
president," he said, "that you be given your salary to the first of
the month--which I hereby hand you--and be told that it will not be
necessary for you to come here after today. In parting with you, Miss
Leavitt, I wish to assure you that the quality of your work for this
organization has been in every respect----"
"I want to speak to the president," said Miss Leavitt.
She did not raise her voice, but no one could have mistaken that her
tone was threatening. She vibrated her head slightly from side to side,
and spit out her _t's_ in a way actually alarming to Bunner, who was a
man susceptible to fear.
"Our decision is quite final--quite final, I'm sorry to say," he said,
fussing with his papers as a hint that she had better go and leave him
in peace.
"That's why I want to speak to him."
"Quite impossible," answered Bunner. "The board is meeting at present
in his room----"
"What!" cried Pearl. "They're all there together, are they?" And before
the office manager took in her intention she was out of his office,
across the main office and in the board room.
Like so many people destined to succeed in New York, Pearl came
originally from Ohio. She was an orphan, and after her graduation from
an Eastern college she had gone back to her native state, meaning to
make her home with her two aunts. It had not been a successful summer.
Not only was it hot, and there was no swimming where her aunts lived,
and Pearl loved to swim, but two of her cousins fell in love with
her--one from each family--and it became a question either of their
leaving home or of her going. So Pearl very gladly came East again, and
under the guidance of her great friend Augusta Exeter began to look for
a job.
She had come East in September, and it was now July--hardly ten
months--and yet in that time she had had and lost four good jobs
through no fault of her own but wholly on account of her extraordinary
beauty. She was not insulted; no one threatened her virtue or offered
to run away with her. It was simply that, like Helen of Troy, "Where'er
she came she brought calamity."
Her first place had been with a publishing firm, Dixon & Gregory.
When Pearl came to them the business was managed by the two sons of
the original firm; the elder Dixon was dead, and the elder Gregory,
a man of fifty-six or eight, came to the office only once or twice
a week. A desk for her had been put in his private room, as it was
almost always vacant. It ceased, however, to be vacant as soon as he
saw Pearl. He had no idea that he had fallen in love with her--perhaps
he had not. He certainly never troubled, her with attentions; as
far as she knew he was hardly aware of her existence. His emotion,
whatever it was, took the form of quarreling with anyone who did speak
to her--even in the course of necessary business. When at last one
day he met her and the younger Dixon going out to lunch at the same
hour and in the same elevator, but purely by accident, he made such a
violent and inexplicable scene that the two younger partners, after
consultation, decided that the only thing to do was to get rid of the
girl quietly--get her to resign. They were both very nice about it,
and themselves found her another place--as secretary to a magazine
editor--a man of ice, they assured her. She never saw the elder Mr.
Gregory again, and a few months later read in the papers of his death.
Her new position went well for several months. The editor was, as
represented, a man of ice; but, as Hamlet has observed, being as pure
as snow and as chaste as ice does not protect against calumny, and the
wife of the editor, entering the office one day to find her husband and
his secretary bending over an illegible manuscript, refused to allow
such dangerous beauty so near her husband, and Pearl lost her second
job.
Her next place was with an ambitious young firm which was putting a
new cleaning fluid on the market. At first, in a busy office, Pearl
seemed to pass almost unnoticed. Then one day the two partners, young
men both and heretofore like brothers, came to her together and asked
her if she would do the firm a great favor--sit for her portrait to
a well-known artist so that they might use her picture as a poster
to advertise their product. Pearl consented--she thought it would be
rather good fun. The result was successful. Indeed, the only criticism
of the picture--which represented Pearl in tawny yellow holding up a
saffron-colored robe at which she smiled brilliantly, with beneath it
the caption, Why Does She Smile? Because Her Old Dress is Made New
by--was that it would have been better to get a real person to sit for
the picture, as the public was tired of these idealized types of female
beauty. But the trouble started over who was to own the original
pastel. It developed that each partner had started the idea from a
hidden wish to own a portrait of Pearl. They quarreled bitterly. The
very existence of the firm was threatened. An old friend of the two
families stepped in and effected a reconciliation, but his decision
was that the girl must go. It did not look well for two boys of their
age--just beginning in business--to have as handsome a woman as that in
the office. People might talk.
It was after this--some time after--that Pearl took the place with the
Encyclopedia company. Her record began to tell against her. Everyone
wanted to know why she changed jobs so often. She thought she had
learned her lesson--not to beam, not to be friendly, not to do anyone
favors. She had made up her mind to stay with the Encyclopedia forever.
She had had no hint of danger. She hardly knew the third vice president
by sight--someone in the office had told her a silly story about his
crying one day, but she hadn't even believed it. And now she had lost
another job--and in July, too, when jobs are hard to find.
Heretofore she had always gone docilely. But now she felt she could
bear it no longer--she must tell someone what she thought.
It was four o'clock on a hot summer afternoon, and round the board-room
table the members were saying "aye" and "no" and "I so move," while
their minds were occupied with the questions that do occupy the mind
at such times--golf and suburban trains, and whether huckleberry pie
in hot weather hadn't been a mistake--when the glass door opened and
a beautiful girl came in like a hurricane. She had evidently been
talking for some seconds when she entered. She was saying, "----are
just terrible. I want to tell you gentlemen, now that I have you
together, that I think men are just terrible." She had a curious voice,
deep and a little rough, more like a boy's than a woman's, yet a voice
which when you once knew Pearl you remembered with affection. "This
is the fourth job I've lost because men have no self-control. I do my
work. I don't even speak to any of you--I'd like to--I'm human, but
I don't dare any more. I attend to business, there's no fault found
with my work--but I've got to go because some man or other can't work
in the office with me. Why not? Because he has no self-control--and
not ashamed of it--not ashamed, that's what shocks me. Why, if a girl
found she couldn't do her work because there was a good-looking man
in the office, she'd die rather than admit she was so silly. But what
does a man do? He goes whining to the president to get the poor girl
dismissed. There it is! I have to go!"
And so on, and so on. The board was so astonished at her entrance, at
the untrammeled way in which she was striding up and down, digging her
heels into the rug and flinging her arms about as she talked, that they
were like people stunned. They turned their eyes with relief to Mr.
Bunner, who came hurrying in behind her.
"Miss Leavitt has been dropped," he began, but she cut him short.
"I've been dropped," she said, "because----"
"Will you let me speak?" said Mr. Bunner--a rhetorical question. He
meant to speak in any case.
"No," answered Pearl. "Certainly not. Gentlemen, I have been
dismissed--I know--because some man in this office has no self-control.
I can't identify him, but I have my suspicions." And she cast a
dreadful glance at the third vice president. "Why should I go? Why
shouldn't he? Crying! Woof! How absurd!"
"Leave the room, Miss Leavitt," said the president; but he weakened the
effect of his edict by leaning forward with his hand to his ear so as
to catch whatever she was going to say next.
"I haven't shed a tear since my mother died," said Mr. Rixon rather
tearfully to the man next him.
"This is not the time to discuss your grievance, Miss Leavitt," said
the treasurer, wondering why he had never kept in closer touch with the
office; "but if you feel you have a just complaint against the company
come to my office tomorrow afternoon----"
"I'll not go near your office," said Pearl, and she began again to
stride about the room, occasionally stamping her right foot without
losing step. "I shall never again go into any office where men are. I
won't work for men. They're poor sports; they have no self----"
"You said that before," said the treasurer.
"----control," Pearl went on, for people in her frame of mind cannot be
stopped. "Why shouldn't he go? But no, you have to be protected from a
girl like a herd of sheep from a wolf--a girl who hasn't even looked
at you, at that. If I had ever spoken to the man----"
"Leave the room instantly, Miss Leavitt," said the president, and this
time he spoke as if he meant it, for he was afraid the identity of the
third vice president might be revealed. Little it mattered to Pearl
what the old man meant.
"I wouldn't mind so much," she went on, "if you did not all pretend
to be so brave and strong--to protect women. You protect each
other--that's who you protect."
"Come, come," said a member of the board. "This isn't the way to keep a
job, you know."
"I don't want to keep this job. I want you for once to hear what a
woman thinks of the men she works for--a lot of poor sports--and not
industrious--none of you work the way girls work for you. Slack, that's
what I call you, and lacking in self-control."
And she went out as suddenly as she had come in, and slammed the door
so hard behind that those members of the board, sitting near it ducked
their heads into their collars in fear of falling glass.
There was a minute's pause, and then the president said with a slight
smile, "Well, Mr. Bunner, I think we all see what you meant when you
said this young woman was a disturbing element in the office."
"There has never been anything like this before," said Bunner; "never
anything in the least like this anywhere I have ever been."
"Well," said the treasurer, "I don't suppose we need distress ourselves
about her finding another job."
There was a certain wistful undercurrent in his tone.
"No," said Bunner, slightly misunderstanding his meaning. "She is
competent and industrious."
"She ought to get married, a pretty girl like that--not go about making
trouble in offices," said the president.
"I have always been of the opinion," said the third vice president,
"that it would be much simpler to run the office entirely with men."
"Oh, it would be much better--much better, of course," said Bunner;
"only women are so much more accurate about detail, more industrious
and less expensive."
And as there was no woman present to inquire why then men were so much
more desirable, the question dropped, and the president recalled the
board's attention to the subject of the paper to be used in their next
edition--the topic under consideration when Pearl made her entrance. It
was rather hard to take any interest in it now.
And so Pearl began once again to go the round of agencies, to interview
or be interviewed by office managers, and hear that if she came back
in October there might be a chance. But October was three months away,
and she could not live three months on something less than a hundred
dollars. She even began to scan the columns of the newspapers--from
clerks, through stenographers, ushers, and finally winders--she never
found out what winders were.
If her dear friend and sage adviser, Augusta Exeter, had been in town
she could have shared her room; but Augusta was in Vermont, visiting
the family of the man she was going to marry. At least, Augusta's last
letter had been from Vermont; but as a matter of fact, three days after
Pearl left the Encyclopedia's employ Augusta came back to New York.
She had had a letter from the agency where her name was registered
practically offering a position which sounded too good to refuse.
Besides, Augusta did not really like farm life in Vermont, and the
Baynes family, for some reason which she could not explain, gave her a
composite picture of Horace, her fiancé, which tended to make her love
him less. Even New York in midsummer was preferable.
Therefore it happened that as Pearl wandered, lonely as a cloud, from
office to office, longing for her friend's wisdom, Augusta herself was
sitting in the outer office of a company, looking for a job.
Though the office was that of the Finlay-Wood Engineering Co., the
position which Miss Augusta Exeter was considering was that of a
governess. She was not at all sure that she wanted the place. College
women are not well disposed toward positions as governesses; yet
as Miss Exeter sat there in the busy outer office and watched the
office boys coming in and out, and the impassive young woman at the
switchboard, enunciating again and again, "Finlay-Wood Company," "Hold
the wire," she went over the advantages of this offer--a high salary,
the two hottest months of the summer at Southampton, and the fact that
as she was to be married in October, she could not take a long-time
position in any case.
Mr. Wood's secretary, with whom so far all the negotiations had
been carried on, had impressed upon her the necessity of being
punctual--"eleven precisely," he had said, for it seemed Mr. Wood was
going to Mexico that afternoon. And so Augusta, who was punctual by
nature, had found herself in the office ten minutes ahead of time. She
sat listening to the telephone girl and watching a door which bore
the simple inscription, "Mr. Wood." And just behind that door a tall
sunburned man in the neighborhood of thirty was standing, slapping the
pockets of his blue serge clothes and saying, "Griggs, I have a feeling
I've forgotten something. What is it I've forgotten, Griggs?"
The desk was as bare as a desk ought to be when its owner is going away
for two months. Griggs ran his eye proudly over it.
"No, Mr. Wood," he said. "I don't think anything has been forgotten.
Nothing was left except the letter to the President, the Spanish
dictionary and the Mexican currency. All that has been attended to."
He consulted a list held in the palm of his hand.
"It was something of my own," said Wood, and he eyed his secretary with
an air that might have appeared stern but was merely concentrated, when
the door opened and the office boy came in and said, "Miss Stone says
she's notified him that there's a lady there to see him, and will we
let her in to him?"
"A lady?" said Griggs severely.
"That's it," said Wood. "It's the governess for my sister. Think of my
nearly forgetting that!"
"You ought not be worried about such things," said Griggs, as if he
were very bitter about it, "with all your responsibilities."
Wood smiled. It wasn't true, but it was the way one's secretary ought
to feel.
"I'd have a lot more to worry me," he said, "if I were married myself."
"You certainly would," answered Griggs, who was married.
"But will we let her in to him?" said the office boy, who clung to this
formula, although the head clerk was trying to break him of it.
"You may let her come in," said Griggs, as if he would perish rather
than allow his chief to hold verbal communication with anything so low
as an office boy, and as he spoke he silently gave Wood a pale-blue
card--one of a dozen on which in beautiful block letters he had written
down the names, degrees, past experience, with notes on personal
appearance, of all the candidates for position of governess in the
household of Wood's sister, Mrs. Conway.
"This is the best of them?" said Wood, and he ran his eye rapidly over
the card, which read:
"Augusta Exeter, A. B. Rutland College; Ph. D., Columbia University,
specialized in mathematics and household management."