The Gorgeous Girl Part 28

Her own satin costume and plumed bonnet seemed a trifle theatrical.

She wished she had worn her trimmest tailored effect to impress upon this tall young woman that no one else could wear tailor things so well as Mrs. Beatrice O'Valley if she chose to do so.

"What can I do for Mrs. O'Valley?" Mary said, almost patronizingly, Beatrice fancied.

"I came in to say h.e.l.lo. I've neglected you lately. But you have been so horrid about not coming to see my gardens that you deserve to be neglected." Her dove-coloured eyes watched Mary closely. "Besides, I want to get something for Mr. O'Valley's desk--as a surprise. You must help me because, as I have realized, you know so much more about him than I do.... There, am I not generous?"

"Very." Mary surmised that something of greater importance lay behind the call than showing off the satin costume or selecting a surprise for Steve.

"What do you suggest? I'm such a frivolous person my husband never tells me his affairs or wishes. The rugs might be in rags and he would never ask me to replenish. I understand now so much more clearly than ever before why business men and women are p.r.o.ne to fall in love with each other; they see each other so constantly under tests of each one's abilities. They have to ask each other favours and grant them.

Sometimes it is a loan of a pencil sharpener, more often it must be the aid of the other fellow's brain to help solve a problem. And they are so shut away from my world. I'm just the pretty mischief-maker who squanders the dollars, and by and by, when self-pity sets in, they find there is a mutual bond of admiration and sympathy. Quite a step toward love, isn't it? As I came in here to-day I could not help thinking of how beautifully you keep business house for my husband.

Why, Mary Faithful, aren't you afraid I am going to be jealous?" She was laughing, but the intention was to have the laugh blow away and the sting of the truth remain.

Mary knew this--and Beatrice knew that she did. So trying to make herself as formidable as a bunch of nettles Mary took heed to answer:

"I'm afraid you have been reading novels--the ones where the business woman grows paler and more interesting looking each day and somehow happens to be wearing a tempting little chiffon frock when the firm fails and the young and handsome junior partner takes refuge in her office and proceeds to brandish a gun and say farewell to the world.

You see, you don't come down to play with us enough to know what prosaic rows there are over pencil sharpeners or who has spirited away the drinking cup or why the window must be six inches from the top because So-and-so has muscular rheumatism. I don't think you are fair, Mrs. O'Valley, and I'm going to risk being quite unpopular by telling you that you have no right to say such things even in jest."

Mary's eyes were very honest and her face seemed even firmer of chin as she leaned her elbows on her desk, looking up at this pretty figurine in satin and plumes.

"Do you fancy it is any fun to go to work at thirteen or fourteen? To rush through breakfast to stand in a crowded car, to have to make your heart very small as the Chinese say, in order to appreciate the pennies and keep them until they become dollars--when all of you longs to play Lady Bountiful? To rub elbows with untruthful mischief-makers, coa.r.s.e-mouthed foremen, impossible young fools who wish to flirt with you and whom you do not dare to rebuke too sharply; to take your hurried noon hour with little food and less fresh air and come back to the daily grind; to walk home or hang on to the tag end of a street-car strap and finally get to your room or your home so tired in body and mind that you wish you had no soul, protesting faintly against girls and women having to be in business?

"No, I don't think you do realize. Or to run errands icy-cold days, down slushy streets or slippery hills? To carry great bundles of such daintiness as you are wearing and leave them at the doors of big houses such as your own, numbed, hungry, envious--and not understanding the wherefore of it? To catch glimpses of warm halls, the sound of a piano playing in a flower-scented salon, to see girls your own age in dainty silk dresses sitting in the window and looking at you curiously as you go down the steps? Oh, I could tell you a great deal more, Mrs. O'Valley."

"Well?"

"Eventually some of us survive and some do not--which is another story! Those of us who do, who endure such days that we may go to night school, and who wear mended gloves and queer hats, forgoing the cheap joys of our a.s.sociates--we do forge ahead and grow grimmer of heart and graver of soul. We realize that we are earning everything we are getting--perhaps more--only we cannot get the recognition we deserve. We are quite different from what you stay-at-home women fancy. Tempting chiffon frocks and love affairs de luxe with handsome junior partners are farthest from our thoughts. We plan for lonely old age--a home and an annuity, a trip to Europe or some other Carca.s.sonne of our thwarted selves. We revel in things as you women do--but we revel in them because people are shut away from us. You women shut away people that you may revel in things.

"All this time the handsome junior partners and so on for whom we keep business house and through propinquity are supposed to love--they have fallen in love with sheltered girls such as your own self, and everything is quite as it ought to be. Now do you really think the capable business women of to-day are letting their abilities be spent in useless rebellion against their fate and loving the members of the firm in Victorian fashion or doing their work intelligently and earning their wage? I hardly think there is room for an argument. You must understand that the years of errand girl, night school, underpaid clerk have taken out of us a certain capacity for enjoyment which you women have had emphasized. But thank G.o.d it has also taken from us a capacity for hysterical suffering, for going on the rocks when we see some joy we crave yet know can never be ours!"

"Oh!" Beatrice murmured, wishing Steve would come in or else Mary be called to the telephone. "Oh----"

"But I do think there is a certain justice developed among modern business women which home women do not comprehend as a rule. Oh, not that I underestimate the home women or the sheltered women. There is a distinction between the two--but I say that the business woman who earns a man's wage and does his work has a certain squareness, for want of a better term, which makes her say, 'If I earn something it is mine and I shall not hesitate thus to label it. Look out--any one who tries to take it from me!' Do you see?"

Mary paused, annoyed at what she had been prevailed upon to say, and wondering if by good fortune her opinions had been delivered to empty ears.

"So you think you would fight for something to which you felt ent.i.tled?"

"Perhaps." The gray eyes had a warrior's strength in them. "Fight, win it, and then spend no time in sentimental regrets. We learn one thing that all women should learn in this great age of selection: That you must earn the things you win, and that if you do so you will most likely keep them."

"And if you felt that you had earned something--and another woman had not--you would play off the conqueror and take the spoils?"

"If I felt it the right thing to do."

Feeling as confused as a bank cashier when caught studying a railroad map Mary hastened to suggest a picture of Beatrice handsomely framed as a surprise for Steve. She was sure he would like nothing any better.

Beatrice felt chirked up upon hearing this. She told herself that Trudy was an inveterate gossip and this queer young person must be thinking aloud about revolutions in Russia or something like that; anything else was too absurd. So she repeated her invitation to come to see the gardens with their jewel-like pools and riotous ma.s.ses of colour, and went on her way to select a most gorgeous frame for a most gorgeous portrait of herself.

Steve expressed his thanks for the surprise picture quite properly, and after giving it a few days of prominence on his desk he relegated it to a shelf beside a weather-beaten map of the Great Lakes which had always been in the office.

And here another phase of the Gorgeous Girl's effort to do something and exercise her faculties occurred. Though she regarded Trudy's gossip as absurd she did not forget it. No woman would. It lay in waiting until the right moment.

Her father's illness and Steve's worried look as he came home each night caused Beatrice to cast about for something n.o.ble and remarkable to do. The conclusion she reached was that it was her duty to retrench; she was not going to have floor-scrubbing d.u.c.h.esses corner all the economy feats. She would make it the mode to live simply, even be penurious in some ways--now that she had the Villa Rosa and a season's budget of frocks. She began looking over the monthly bills in deadly earnest. The result was a blinding headache which prevented her going in to see her father. She retired to her room in cream lace with endless strings of coral, and left word for Steve to drop in on his way to his own room.

"Deary, I've been too extravagant," she began faintly as he opened the door. She reached out her hand to find his.

He brought a chair over beside the chaise-longue and sat down obediently, holding the small, fragrant fingers in his own. "I'd be mighty glad if you felt you could live more simply."

"You duck! Just what I'm about to do. I'm going to be the loveliest Queen Calico you ever did see--I've no doubt but what I'll be making you a beefsteak pudding before long."

Steve smiled. "Who will take this castle of gloom from under us?"

"Oh! We may as well stay here--I don't mean that sort of retrenching--I mean in other ways. I'm not going to give expensive bridge parties or keep three motors and a saddle horse--I can't ride any more, anyway--and I'm not going to have a professional reader for papa.

Aunt Belle, you, and I can manage that--that will take fifteen dollars a week from the expenses. Besides, I am going to have three-course dinners from now on--no game, fish, or extra sweet. That will make a difference--in time. I shall not buy the new dinner set I had halfway ordered--it was wonderful, of course, but I have no right to use money for nonsense. Papa can give it to me for my birthday if he wants to. Gifts don't count, do they, Stevuns?

"Then there is the servant question. Now cook is seventy-five dollars a month; the three maids are fifty each, besides all they steal and waste; the laundress and her helper, the chauffeur and all the garden men; the food, light, heat--to say nothing of extra expenses; my parties and trips and the enormous bills for taxes and upkeep that papa pays--I'm afraid to say how much it comes to each month. But it is going to stop! Then my clothes--I'm just ashamed to think--while you, poor dear, exist on nothing----Oh, thank you, Elsie." A maid had brought in a supper tray.

"I didn't want to come downstairs, so I sent for some lunch." She watched Steve's amused expression. "Aunt Belle gets on my nerves and unless we are having people in, the room is too big to have a family meal."

On the tray was a dish heaped with tartlettes aux fruits, cornets a la creme, babas au rhum, pet.i.ts fours, madeleines, and Napoleons. There was another dish filled with marrons glaces and malaga grapes preserved in sugar. A few faint wedges of bread and b.u.t.ter pointed the way to the pot of iced chocolate and the pitcher of whipped cream.

"Well," Steve ventured, looking at the tray, "I'm afraid I don't agree----"

"I know your ideas. You think I ought to be frying chops for you and giving praise because I have a nineteen-dollar near-taffeta dress. I can just see you walking round a two-by-four back yard measuring the corn and putting the watermelons into eiderdown sleeping bags so they won't freeze; then telling everyone at the shop what an ideal home life you lead! No, deary, I'm retrenching because it's a novelty, and you would like to retrench----"

"Because I may be forced to do so. I hate to worry you--I never mean to unless there is no other way out--but I must warn you that the abnormal war conditions are no longer inflating business and everyone is watching his step. I cannot take your father's place; he carved it out step by step. I fairly aeroplaned to the top and found that while I was sitting there in fancied security other people were busy chopping down the steps and I should find myself having a great old fall down to earth. Now----"

"Don't tell any more things," she murmured, deep in a fruit tart. "I can't understand. You are a big, strong man. Go keep your fortune; let me play. I'll retrench for fun, and you must love me for it."

"But you are not sincere," he protested. "You don't earn anything. You don't save anything----"

Beatrice sat upright, laying aside her plate and fork. "So you believe that, too," she half whispered.

"See here," Steve added, in desperation. "I wish we were back in the apartment--or a simple house. I wish we kept a cook and a maid and you had a simple outfit of clothes and a simple routine. I wish we were just folks--you know the sort--you don't find them any place else but America--it's a tremendous chance to be just folks if you would only realize. I feel as if this were a soap-bubble castle, as if we were deliberately playing a wrong game all round."

"You tell papa," she begged; "and if he thinks I'm unhappy he will write me another check."

"Then the retrenching is to be the elimination of the fifteen-dollar-a-week professional reader, who needs the work and earns the money, and two courses from our already aldermanic meals?

What else?"

"I shall send the silver to the bank and use plate. The smartest people do that. I shall make aunty embroider my monograms; she can as well as not--the last were frightfully expensive. I'm going to bargain sales after this, and take cook and drive out to the Polish market.

Why, things are two and three cents a pound cheaper----"

Steve rose abruptly, tipping over the dainty chair as he did so. He tried to straighten out the pinky rug and set the chair properly upon it. Then he squared off his shoulders and dutifully stooped to kiss his economical little helpmate.

"All right, darling," he said, glibly, feeling that Gorgeous Girls were get-rich-quick men's albatrosses, "that will be very amusing for you. It will tide you over until the horse-show season. Now if you don't mind I'm going below to ask what the chances are for some roast beef!"

Toward Christmas, when Beatrice had gone to New York with friends and Mark Constantine discovered that dying is ever so much harder than death, Mary told Steve that she was considering a new position, with a firm dealing in fabrics, a firm of old and honourable reputation.