THE first night that Emily ventured home alone a man spoke to her before she had got twenty feet from the car tracks. She had thought that if this should happen she would faint. But when he said, “It’s a pleasant evening,” she put her head down and walked steadily on and told herself she was not in the least frightened. It was not until she was inside her door that her legs trembled and her heart beat fast. She sank down on the stairs in the dark and had a nervous chill. And it was a very unhappy, discouraged, self-distrustful girl that presently crept shakily up to bed.
On the second night-journey she thought she heard some one close and stealthy behind her. She broke into a run, arriving at the door out of breath and ashamed of herself. “You might have been arrested,” said Miss Gresham when Emily confessed to her. “If a policeman had seen you, he’d have thought you were flying from the scene of your crime.”
A few nights afterwards a policeman did stop her. “You’ve got to keep out of this street,” he began roughly. “I’ve noticed you several times now.”
Instead of being humiliated or frightened, Emily became angry. “I’m a newspaper woman—on the Democrat,” she said haughtily, and just then he got a full view of her face and of the look in her eyes.
He took off his helmet. “Beg pardon, miss,” he said humbly, and with sincerity of regret. “I’m very sorry. I didn’t see you distinctly. I’ve got a sister that does night work. I ought to a knowed better.”
Emily made no reply, but went on. She was never afraid again, and after a month wondered how it had been possible for her to be afraid, and pitied women who were as timid and helpless as she had been. Whenever the policeman passed her he touched his hat. She soon noticed that it was not always the same policeman and understood that the first one had warned the entire force at the station house. Often when there were many loungers in the street the policeman turned and followed her at a respectful distance until she was home; and one rainy night he asked her to wait in the shelter of a deep doorway at the corner while he went across to a saloon and borrowed an umbrella. He gave it to her and dropped behind, coming up to get it at her door.
Thus what threatened to be her greatest trial proved no trial at all.
On the last day of her first week, Mr. Stilson sent for her and gave her an order on the cashier for twelve dollars. “Are they treating you well?” he asked, his eyes kind and encouraging.
“Yes, you are treating me well.”
Stilson coloured.
“And I honestly don’t think I’ve earned so much money,” she went on.
“I’m not in the habit of swindling the owners of the Democrat,” he interrupted curtly.
Emily turned away, humiliated and hurt. “He is insulting,” she said to herself with flashing eyes and quivering lips. “Oh, if I did not have to endure it, I’d say things he’d not forget.”
She was sitting at her desk, still fuming, when he came out of his office and looked round. As he walked toward her, she saw that he was limping painfully. “Pardon me, Miss Bromfield,” he said. “I’m suffering the tortures of hell from this infernal rheumatism.” And he was gone without looking at her or giving her a chance to reply.
“So, it’s only rheumatism,” she thought, mollified as to the rudeness, but disappointed as to the office romance of the City Editor’s “secret sorrow.” She did not tell Miss Gresham of the apology, but could not refrain from saying: “I have heard that Mr. Stilson is rude because he is rheumatic.”
“That may have something to do with it. I remember when he got it. He was a writer then, and went down to the Oil River floods. The correspondents had to sleep on the wet ground, and endure all sorts of hardships. He was in a hospital in Pittsburg for two months. But there’s something else besides rheumatism in his case. Long before that, I saw——”
Miss Gresham stopped short, seemed irritated against herself, and changed the subject abruptly.
Emily timidly joined the crowd at the cashier’s window and, when her turn came, was much disconcerted by the sharp, suspicious look which the man within cast at her. She signed and handed in her order. He searched through the long rows of envelopes in the pay drawer—searched in vain. Another suspicious look at her and he began again. “I’m not to get it after all” she thought with a sick, sinking feeling—how often afterward she remembered those anxious moments and laughed at herself. The cashier’s man searched on and presently drew out an envelope. Again that sharp look and he handed her the money. She could not restrain a deep sigh of relief.
She went home in triumph to Theresa and displayed the ten dollar bill and the two ones as if they were the proofs of a miracle. “It’s a thrilling sensation,” she said, “to find that I can really do something for which somebody will pay.” She remembered Stilson’s rudeness. “It was not so bad after all,” she thought. “He convinced me that I had really earned the money. If he’d been polite I should have feared he was giving it to me out of good-nature.”
“Oh, you’re getting on all right,” said Theresa. “I saw Marlowe last night at Delmonico’s. Frank and I were dining there, and he stopped to speak to us. I asked him about you, and—shall I tell you just what he said?”
“Well, he said—of course, I asked about you the first thing—and he said that he and your City Editor had been dining at the Lotos Club—Mr. Stilson, isn’t it? And Mr. Stilson said: ‘If she wasn’t so good-looking, there might be a chance of her becoming a real person.’ Marlowe says that’s a high compliment for Mr. Stilson, because he is mad on the subject of idle, useless women and men. And, Mr. Stilson went on to say that you had judgment and weren’t vain, and that you had as much patience and persistence as Miss—I forget her name——”
“Was it Gresham?” asked Emily.
“No—that wasn’t the name. Was it Tarheel or Farheel or Farville—no—it was——”
“Oh.” Emily looked disappointed and foolish. She had seen Miss Farwell an hour before—patient and persevering indeed, but frowzier and more “put upon” than ever.
“Yes—Miss Farwell. Who is she?”
“One of the women down at the office,” Emily said, and hurried on with: “What else did Marlowe say?”
“That’s all, except that he wanted us four to dine together soon. When can you go—on a Sunday?”
“No, Monday—that’s my free day. I took it because it is also Miss Gresham’s day off. She’s the only friend I’ve made downtown thus far.”
Marlowe came to Emily’s desk one morning in her third week on the Democrat. “What did you have in the paper to-day?” he asked, after he had explained that he was just returned from Washington and Chicago.
“A few paragraphs,” she replied, drawing a space slip from a drawer and displaying three small items pasted one under the other.
“Not startling, are they?” was Marlowe’s comment. “I’ve asked Miss Duncan to bring you to dine with Demorest and me—the postponed dinner. But I’d rather dine with you alone. I don’t think Demorest shines in your society; then, too, we can talk shop. I’ve a great deal to say to you, and I think I can be of some use. We could dine in the open air up at the Casino—don’t you like dining in the open air?”
Emily had been brought up under the chaperon system. While she had no intention of clinging to it, she hesitated now that the occasion for beginning the break had come. Also, she remembered what Marlowe had said to her at her door. She wished that she were going unchaperoned with some other man first.
“There’s a prejudice against the Casino among some conventional people,” he said. “But that does not apply to us.”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that,” and she accepted.
She asked Miss Gresham about him a few hours afterward.
“You’ve met Mr. Marlowe?” she said, in a cordial tone. “Don’t you think him clever? You may hear some gossip about him—and women. He’s good-looking, and—and much like all men in one respect. He’s the sort of man that is suspected of affairs, but whose name is never coupled with any particular woman’s. That’s a good sign, don’t you think? It shows that the gossip isn’t started or encouraged by him.”
“Is it—proper for me to go to dinner with him alone?”
“Why not? Of course, if they see you, they may talk about you. But what does that matter? It would be different if you were waiting with folded hands for some man to come along and undertake to support you for life. Then gossip might damage your principal asset. But now your principal asset isn’t reputation for conventionality, but brains. And you don’t have to ask favours of anybody.”
Marlowe and Emily had a table at the end of the walk parallel with the entrance-drive. The main subject of conversation was Emily—what she had done, what she could do, and how she could do it. “All that I’m saying is general,” he said. “I’ll help you to apply it, if I may. There’s no reason why you should not be doing well—making at least forty dollars a week—within six months. We’ll get up some Sunday specials together to help you on faster. The main point is a new way of looking at whatever you’re writing about. Your good taste will always save you from being flat or silly, even when you’re not brilliant.”
While Marlowe talked, Emily observed, as accurately as it is possible for a young person to observe when the person under observation is good-looking, young, of the opposite sex, and when both are, consciously and unconsciously, doing their utmost to think well each of the other. He had a low, agreeable voice, and an unusually attractive mouth. His mind was quick, his manner simple and direct. Although he was clearly younger than thirty-five, his hair was sprinkled with gray at the temples, and there were wrinkles in his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. He made many gestures, and she liked to watch his hands—the hands of an athlete, but well-shaped.
“I ride and swim almost every day,” he said incidentally to some discussion about the sedentary life. And she knew why he looked in perfect health. Emily admired him, liked him, with the quick confidence of youth trusted him, before they had been talking two hours. And it pleased her to see admiration of her in his eyes, and to feel that he was physically and mentally glad to be near her.
As they were drinking champagne (slightly modified by apollinaris), the acquaintance progressed swiftly. It would have been all but impossible for her to resist the contagion of his open-mindedness, had she been so inclined. But she herself had rapidly changed in her month in New York. She felt that she was able to meet a man on his own ground now, and that she understood men far better, and she seemed to herself to be seeing life in a wholly new aspect—its aspect to the self-reliant and free. She helped him to hasten through those ante-rooms to close acquaintance, where, as he put it, “stupid people waste most of their time and all their chances for happiness.”
He had a way of complimenting her which was peculiarly insidious. He was talking earnestly about her work, his mind apparently absorbed. Abruptly he interrupted himself with, “Don’t mind my talking so much. It’s happiness. One is not often happy. And I feel to-night”—this with raillery in his voice—“like an orchid hunter who has been dragging himself through jungles for days and is at last rewarded with the sight of a new and wonderful specimen—high up in a difficult tree, but still, perhaps, accessible.” And then he went on to discuss orchids with her and told a story of an acquaintance, a half-mad orchid hunter—all with no further reference to her personality.
It was not until they were strolling through the Park toward Fifty-ninth street that the subject which is sure to appear sooner or later in such circumstances and conjunctions started from cover and fluttered into the open.
He glanced at the moon. “It would be impossible to improve upon that nice old lady up there as a chaperon, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m not sure that I’d give my daughter into her charge,” said Emily.
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh, I think it all depends upon the woman.”
“Any woman who couldn’t be trusted with the moon as a chaperon, either wouldn’t be safe with any chaperon or wouldn’t be worth saving from the consequences of her own folly.”
“Possibly. But—I confess I wouldn’t trust even myself implicitly to that old lady up there, as you call her.”
“But you are doing so this evening.”
“Mercy, no. I’ve two other guardians—myself and you.”
“Thank you for including me. I’m afraid I don’t deserve it.”
“Then I’ll try to arrange it so that I sha’n’t have to call you in to help me.”
“Would you think me very absurd if I told you, in the presence of your chaperon, that”—His look made her’s waver for an instant—“I must have my orchid?”
“Not absurd,” replied Emily. “But abrupt and——”
“And—what?”
“And”—She laughed. “And interesting.”
“There’s only a short time to live,” he answered, “and I’m no longer so young as I once was. But I don’t wish to hurry you. I don’t expect any answer now—it would be highly improper, even if your answer were ready.” He looked at her with a very agreeable audacity. “And I’m not sure that it isn’t ready. But I can wait. I simply spoke my own mind, as soon as I saw that it would not be disagreeable to you to hear it.”
“Instinct, pure instinct. No sensitive man ever failed to know whether a woman found him tolerable or intolerable.”
“Don’t think,” said Emily, seriously but not truthfully, “that I’m taking your remark as a tribute to myself. I understand that you are striving to do what is expected of a man on such a night as this.”
“Does one have to tear his hair, and foam at the mouth, in order to convince you?” asked Marlowe, his eyes laughing, yet earnest too.
“Yes,” said Emily calmly. “Begin—please.”
“No—I’ve said enough, for the evening.” He was walking close to her, and there was no raillery in either his tone or his eyes. “It’s so new and wonderful a sensation to me, that as yet, just the pleasure of it is all that I ask.”
“But you don’t fit in with my plans—not at all,” she said, in a way that must have been encouraging since it was not in the least discouraging. “I’m a working-woman, and must not bother with—with orchid hunters.”
“Your plans? Oh!” He laughed, “Let me help you revise them.” He saw her face change. “Or rather,” he quickly corrected, “let me help you realise them.”
They were to join Theresa and Frank at the New York roof-garden. Just before they entered the street doors, he said: “I think there are only two things in the world worth living for—work and love. And I think neither is perfect without the other. Perhaps—who knows?—”
Her answering look was not directed toward him, but it was none the less an answer. It made him feel that they were both happy in the anticipation of greater happiness imminent.