Mary Minds Her Business Part 28

"Perhaps I ought to show it to him," she uneasily thought. "If a thing like this is being whispered around, I think he ought to get to the bottom of it, and stop it.... I know I don't like him for some things,"

she continued, more undecided than ever, "but that's all the more reason why I should be fair to him--in things like this, for instance."

She compromised by tucking the letter in her pocket, and when Judge Cutler dropped in that afternoon, she first made him promise secrecy, and then she showed it to him.

"I feel like you," he said at last. "An anonymous attack like this is usually beneath contempt. And I feel all the more like ignoring it because it raises a question which I have been asking myself lately: How _can_ a man on a ten thousand dollar salary afford to buy an eight thousand dollar car?"

Mary couldn't follow that line of reasoning at all.

"Why do you feel like ignoring it, if it's such a natural question?" she asked.

"Because it's a question that might have occurred to anybody."

That puzzled Mary, too.

"Perhaps Burdon has money beside his salary," she suggested.

"He hasn't. I know he hasn't. He's in debt right now."

They thought it over in silence.

"I think if I were you, I'd tear it up," he said at last.

She promptly tore it into shreds.

"Now we'll forget that," he said. "I must confess, however, that it has raised another question to my mind. How long is it since your bookkeeping system was overhauled here?"

She couldn't remember.

"Just what I thought. It must need expert attention. Modern conditions call for modern methods, even in bookkeeping. I think I'll get a good firm of accountants to go over our present system, and make such changes as will keep you in closer touch with everything that is going on."

Mary hardly knew what to think.

"You're sure it has nothing to do with this?" she asked, indicating the fragments in the waste-basket.

"Not the least connection! Besides," he argued, "you and I know very well--don't we?--that with all his faults, Burdon would never do anything like that--"

"Of course he wouldn't!"

"Very well. I think we ought to forget that part of it, and never refer to it again--or it might be said that we were fearing for him."

This masculine logic took Mary's breath away, but though she thought it over many a time that day, she couldn't find the flaw in it.

"Men are queer," she finally concluded. "But then I suppose they think women are queer, too. To me," she thought, "it almost seems insulting to Burdon to call accountants in now; but according to the judge it would be insulting to Burdon not to call them in--"

She was still puzzling over it when Archey, that stormy petrel of bad news, came in and very soon took her mind from anonymous letters.

"The finishers are getting ready to quit," he announced. "They had a vote this noon. It was close, but the strikers won."

They both knew what a blow this would be. With each successive wave of the strike movement, it grew harder to fill the men's places with women.

"If this keeps on, I don't know what we shall do," she thought. "By the time we have filled these empty places, we shall have as many women working here as we had during the war."

Outwardly, however, she gave no signs of misgivings, but calmly set in motion the machinery which had filled the gaps before.

"If you're going to put that advertis.e.m.e.nt in again," said Archey, "I think I'd add 'Nursery, Restaurant, Rest-room, Music'"

She included the words in her copy, and after a moment's reflection she added "Laundry."

"But we have no laundry," objected Archey, half laughing. "Are you forgetting a little detail like that?"

"No, I'm not," said Mary, her eyes dancing. "You must do the same with the laundry as I did with the kindergarten. Go to Boston this afternoon.... Take a laundryman with you if you like.... And bring the things back in the morning by motor truck. We have steam and hot water and plenty of buildings, and I'm sure it won't take long to get the machines set up when you once get them here--"

At such moments there was something great in Mary. To conceive a plan and put it through to an irresistible conclusion: there was nothing in which she took a deeper delight.

That night, at home, she told them of her new plan.

"Just think," she said, "if a woman lives seventy years, and the washing is done once a week, you might say she spent one-seventh of her life--or ten whole years--at the meanest hardest work that was ever invented--"

"They don't do the washing when they're children," said Helen.

"No, but they hate it just as much. I used to see them on wash days when Aunt Patty took me around, and I always felt sorry for the children."

Wally came in later and listened sadly to the news of the day.

"You're only using yourself up," he said, "for a lot of people who don't care a snap of the finger for you. It seems to me," he added, "that you'd be doing better to make one man happy who loves you, than try to please a thousand women who never, never will."

She thought that over, for this was an angle which hadn't occurred to her before.

"No," she said, "I'm not doing it to gain anything for myself, but to lift the poor women up--to give them something to hope for, something to live for, something to make them happier than they are now. Yes, and from everybody's point of view, I think I'm doing something good. Because when the woman is miserable, she can generally make her man miserable. But when the woman is happy, she can nearly always make the man happy, too."

"I wish you'd make me happy," sighed poor Wally.

"Here comes Helen," said Mary with just the least trace of wickedness in her voice. "She'll do her best, I'm sure."

Helen was dressed for the evening, her arms and shoulders gleaming, her coiffure like a golden turban.

"Mary hardly ever dresses any more," she said as she came down the stairs, "so I feel I have to do double duty."

On the bottom landing she stopped and with extravagant motions of her body sang the opening lines of the Bedouin's Love Song, Wally joining in at last with his plaintive, pa.s.sionate tenor.

"If you ever lose your money, Wally," she said, coming down the remaining stairs, "we'll take up comic opera." Curtseying low she simpered, "My lord!" and gave him her hand to kiss.

"She knows how to handle men," thought Mary watching, "just as the women at the factory know how to handle metal. I wonder if it comes natural to her, or if she studies it by herself, or if she learned any of it at Miss Parsons'."

She was interrupted by a message from Hutchins, the butler. The spread of the strike had been flashed out by the news a.s.sociation early in the afternoon, and the eight-ten train had brought a company of reporters.

"There are half a dozen of them," said Hutchins, n.o.ble in voice and deportment. "Knowing your kindness to them before, I took the liberty of showing them into the library. Do you care to see them, or shall I tell them you are out?"