After that there was a silence, out of which Nannie asked: "Does your
head ache, Mary?"
"A little."
"Can't I get you something?"
"No. After I've rested a bit I'll take a walk."
Mary's walk led her by the lighted shop windows. The air was keen and
cold and helped her head. But it did not help her heart. She had a sense
of suffocation when she thought of Nannie.
She stopped in front of one of the shops. There were dolls in the
window, charming, round-eyed, ringleted. One of them was especially
captivating, with fat blond curls, fat legs, blue silk socks and
slippers, crisp frills and a broad blue hat.
"How I should have loved her when I was a little girl," was Mary's
thought as she stood looking in. Then: "How a child of my own would have
loved her."
She made up her mind that she would buy the doll--in the morning when
the shop opened. It was a whimsical thing to do, to give herself a doll
at her time of life. But it would be in a sense symbolic. She had no
child to which to give it; she would give it to the child who was once
herself.
She came home with a lighter heart and with the knowledge of what she
had to do. She put on her blue house coat and sat down to her desk with
its embossed leather fittings, and there under the lovely, lamp which
Kingdon Knox had given her she wrote to Nannie.
She gave the letter to Nannie the next morning. "I want you to read it
when you are all alone. Then tear it up. It must always be just between
you and me, Nannie."
Nannie read the letter in the lunch hour. She got her lunch at a
cafeteria and there was a rest room. It was very quiet and she had a
corner to herself. She wondered what Mary had to say to her, and why she
didn't talk it out instead of writing about it.
But Mary had felt that she could not trust herself to speak. There would
have been Nannie's eyes to meet, questions to answer; and this meant so
much. Paper and pen were impersonal.
"It isn't easy to talk such things out, Nannie. I should never have
written this if I had not realized last night that your feet were
following the path which my own have followed for fifteen years.
And I knew that you were envying me and wanting to be like me; and
I am saying what I shall say in this letter so that I may save you,
Nannie.
"When I first came into Mr. Knox's office I was young like you, and
I had a lover, young and fine like Dick, and he satisfied me. We
had our plans--of a home and the happiness we should have together.
If I had married him, I should now have sons and daughters growing
up about me, and when Christmas came there would be a tree and
young faces smiling, and my husband, smiling.
"But Mr. Knox talked to me as he talked to you. He told me, too, to
wait--for Prince Charming. He told me I was too fine to be wasted.
He hinted that the man I was planning to marry was a plain fellow,
not good enough for me. He talked and I listened. He opened vistas.
I saw myself raised to a different sphere by some man like Mr.
Knox--just as well groomed, just as distinguished, just as rich and
wonderful.
"But such men don't come often into the lives of girls like you and
me, Nannie. I know that now. I did not know it then. But Mr. Knox
should have known it. Yet he held out the hope; and at last he
robbed me of my future, of the little home, my fine, strong
husband. He robbed me of my woman's heritage of a child in my arms.
"And in return he gave me--nothing. I have found in the years that
I have been with him that he likes to be admired and looked up to
by pretty women. He likes to mold us into something exquisite and
ornamental, he likes to feel that he has molded us. He likes to see
our blushes. All these years that I have been with him, he has
liked to feel that I looked upon him as the ideal toward which all
my girlish dreams tended.
"He is not in love with me, and I am not in love with him. But he
has always known that if he had been free and had wooed me, I
should have felt that King Cophetua had come to the beggar maid.
Yet, too late, I can see that if he had been free he would never
have wooed me. His ambition would have carried him up and beyond
anything I can ever hope to be, and he would have sought some woman
of his own circle who would have contributed to his material
success.
"And now he is trying to spoil your life, Nannie--to make you
discontented with your future with Dick. You look at him and see in
your life some day a Prince Charming. But I tell you this, Nannie,
that Prince Charming will never come. And after a time all you will
have to show for the years that you have spent in the office will
be just a pretty room, a few bits of wood and leather and bronze in
exchange for warm, human happiness, clinging hands, a husband like
Dick, who adores you, who comes home at night, eager--for you!
"You can have all this--and I have lost it. And there isn't much
ahead of me. I shan't always be ornamental, and then Mr. Knox will
let me drop out of his life, as he has let others drop out. And
there'll be loneliness and old age and--nothing else.
"Oh, Nannie, I want you to marry Dick. I want you to know that all
the rest is dust and ashes. I feel tired and old; and when I think
of your youth, and beauty, I want Dick to have it, not Mr. Knox,
who will flatter and--forget.
"Tear this letter up, Nannie. It hasn't been easy to write. I don't
want anybody but you to read it."
But Nannie did not tear it up.
She tucked it in her bag and went to telephone to Dick.
And would he meet her on the corner under the street lamp that night
when she came home from the office? She had something to tell him.
Dick met Nannie, and presently they pursued their rapturous way. A
little later Tommy Jackson passed by. Something caught his eye.
A bit of white paper.
He stooped and picked it up. It was Mary's letter to Nannie. Nannie had
cried into her little handkerchief while she talked to Dick, and in
getting the handkerchief out of the bag the letter had come with it and
had dropped unnoticed to the ground.
It had been years since Tommy had seen any of Mary's writing. A sentence
caught his eye, and he read straight through. After all, there are
things permitted an officer of the law which might be unseemly in the
average citizen.
And when he had read, Tommy began to say things beneath his breath. And
the chances are that had Kingdon Knox appeared at that moment things
would have fared badly with him.
But it was Mary Barker who came. She had under her arm in a paper
parcel the fat doll with the blond curls and the blue socks. She did not
see Tommy until she was almost upon him.