LOVE

A poor stenographer—The positive young lady under altered circumstances—Miss Gentles's story—A hard road for tender feet—Social and sentimental—A misunderstanding—Which is made right in the only way—My boss invites us to dinner—Another kind of woman—A woman's shrewdness—The social gift—At the opera—Business and pleasure—Sarah on Mrs. Dround

It was a hot day in August three years after the trial; I was sitting in Carmichael's office trying to get a breath of fresh air from his west windows. I called old Peters and asked him to send me up a stenographer.

"Haven't a good one in the place, Mr. Harrington," he said. "All the smart ones are off on their vacation. There's Miss Gentles, though—the old man generally keeps her for himself, but he's gone home by this time."

"Send up anything so long as it can write!"

"Well, she ain't much good," Peters replied.

I had my head down behind my desk when the stenographer came in, and I began to dictate without looking up. These stenographer ladies were all of a piece to me,—pert, knowing misses,—all but Miss Harben: she was fifty and sour, and took my letters like biting off thread. This one evidently wasn't in her class, for pretty soon she sang out:—

"Please wait! I can't go so fast."

So I waited, and looked up to see what I had to do with. This young woman was a good-looking, ladylike person, with a mass of lovely brown hair and long brown eyelashes. She was different from the other girls in the office, and yet it seemed to me I had seen her before. She was dressed in black, a sort of half mourning, I judged. Pretty soon she got stuck again and asked me to repeat. This time she looked at me imploringly.

"I am not very good," she said with a smile.

"No, you are not," I replied.

She laughed at my blunt answer—laughed pleasantly, like a lady who knows how to turn off a harsh truth, not flirtatiously, like most of her profession.

"Been long at it?" I asked the next time she broke down.

"Not so very. I graduated from the school about six months ago, and I have always worked for Mr. Dround since then. He doesn't talk as fast as you do, not nearly."

She smiled again at me, frankly and naturally. Suddenly I remembered where I had seen that face before, and when she looked up again I said:—

"Did you ever find that purse, Miss Gentles?"

She looked puzzled at first; then a light spread over her face, and she stammered:—

"Why, of course, you are the Mr. Harrington who—But you have changed!"

"Rather, I hope! And the light wasn't good in the police station that morning."

Miss Gentles leaned back in her chair and laughed, a blush spreading prettily over her face.

"It's all so funny!" she exclaimed.

"Funnier now than it was then," I admitted.

"I am very glad to meet you again. No, I never found that purse. The judge still twits me, when he sees me, about changing my mind. He thinks—" Then she stopped in embarrassment, and it was some time before I found out what the judge did think.

"Have you been back to that place in Indiana?" she asked. And we had quite a chat. She talked to me like a young lady who was receiving a caller in her father's house. It took a long time to finish the few letters I had started to write. When she went, I got up and opened the door for her. I had to.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Harrington," she said, holding out her hand. "I am so glad to have met you again."

Old Peters, who was in the outer office, looked at us in considerable surprise. When Miss Gentles had gone he remarked in a gossiping way:—

"So you know the young woman?"

"I met her once years ago," I admitted. "How did she land here? She doesn't seem to have had much experience as a stenographer."

"No, she hasn't. Her father died several years ago, and didn't leave a cent. He was a very popular doctor, though—a Southerner. They lived kind of high, I guess, while there was anything. The Drounds knew them in their better days, and when the doctor died Mrs. Dround tried to help the girl in one way and another. Then they fixed up this job for her. I guess Mr. Dround don't work her very hard. Sorry you were troubled with her. We'll see that you get a rattler the next time, Mr. Harrington," he ended. (The men in the office were pretty nice to "Mr. Harrington" these days!)

"Oh, she isn't so bad!" I said to Peters. For I rather looked forward to seeing the pretty, pleasant-mannered girl again. "I'd just as soon have Miss Gentles next week when Mr. Dround goes East, if no one else wants her."

Old Peters had a twinkle in his eyes as he answered:—

"Just as you say, Mr. Harrington."

So I came to see a good deal of Miss Gentles that summer while Mr. Dround was away on his vacation. I can't say that the young lady developed much business ability. She forgot most things with a wonderful ease, and she was never very accurate. But she tried hard, and it seemed to worry her so when I pointed out her mistakes that I took to having in another stenographer in the afternoon to finish what she hadn't done.

Miss Gentles boarded with an old aunt of her mother's near where Slocum and I lived. I gathered that the aunt and her husband were not very kind to her. They thought she ought to marry, having good looks and no money. Miss Gentles let me call on her, and before the summer was over we were pretty well acquainted. For a long time the thought of May had kept me from looking at a woman; I always saw that little white face and those searching eyes, and heard that mocking laugh. But Miss Gentles was so different from May that she never made me think of the woman I had once loved.

I took Slocum to call on my new acquaintance, but they didn't get on well together. She thought his old Yankee ways were hard, and I suppose he thought I was bound on the voyage of life with a pleasure-loving mate. He used to growl to me about tying myself to a woman, but I always said he needn't worry about me—I wasn't the marrying kind.

"Oh, you'll be wanting to get married the same as the rest of the world," Sloco would answer, "and have a wife and children to spend your money on and make you earn more!"

But I thought differently. A man of my sort, I replied to him, works and fights just the same without wife or child, because of the fight in him, because he can't help himself, any more than the man who wants to drink can keep his lips from the glass. It's in his blood and bone....

Miss Gentles had seen a good deal of society,—the best there was in the city in those early days. It was odd to hear her talking about people who were just big names to me, as if she had known them all her life. I must have struck her as pretty green. But she made me feel from the first like some one she had always known. She was proud enough, but simple, and not in the least reserved. She told me all about her people, the easy times and the hard times. And never a word of complaint or regret for all the parties and good things that were gone out of her life. She was one to take her beer with a joke when she couldn't have champagne. Of course, I told her, first and last, all my story. She made me take her to see the Hostetters at the old place on Van Buren Street. Then the four of us went up the lake on a picnic one Sunday. Hillary, I remember, was sullen because Ed paid so much attention to Miss Gentles on this trip.

So we became good friends. Yet I never felt really intimate with her, as I had with Hillary, and when I tried to step past a certain line she had her own way of keeping me off, not haughtily or pertly, but like a lady who knew how people of the great world, where I had never been, behaved to one another. One day, I remember, I was fool enough to send her a little fancy purse with a gold eagle in it, and a line saying that it was time for me to make restitution, or something of the sort. My gift came back quick enough, with a clever little note tucked inside, saying she couldn't let me admit that I had taken her purse. It was a good lesson for me.

When Mr. Dround returned in the fall she reported to him for work, and I was not altogether sorry. I had plenty of chances to see her outside of the office now, and I was desperately busy. In a few days, however, when I happened to be in Mr. Dround's office on some matter, he began to talk about Miss Gentles. Peters had told him that I had had her as my stenographer during his absence, and Mr. Dround would like to have me continue, as she wasn't adapted to his needs. Then he spoke of her people, and how he and Mrs. Dround had held them in the highest esteem, and had tried to do something for this girl. But there had seemed to be nothing that she was really fitted to do.

So we began again our work together, only it was worse; for her fashionable friends were back in the city now, and they kept inviting her out to parties and one thing and another, until she was too sleepy to do her work in the morning and was rather irregular. Then she was ill, off for a fortnight. I had Peters hire me another stenographer, a man, and Miss Gentles still drew her pay. Peters winked at me when I suggested that he needn't mention the fact of her absence in his report. I suppose, if I had stopped to think of it, I should have considered it more businesslike of her to quit her society and parties when she found they were interfering with her work. It was human, though, that she should want to get a little fun out of her life, and not lose sight altogether of the gay world where they have time to amuse themselves. And a pretty woman like her could hardly be expected to take stenography in a stock-yards office seriously.

Well, I missed her more and more, especially as I couldn't see her now that she was ill, and had to content myself with nice little notes of thanks for the flowers and fruit I sent. She came back at last, looking weak and droopy, for the first time rather hopeless, as if she saw that she wasn't fitted for the job and couldn't keep up with her friends, either. I felt very sorry for her. She wasn't made for work—any one could see that—and it was a cruel shame to let her boggle on with it. Just then I had to go to Texas on business; when I got back a week or so later, Peters told me that Miss Gentles had left five days before. A cold little note on my desk said good-by, and thanked me for my kindness to her—never a word of explanation.

I was so upset that I didn't wait to open my letters, but called a cab and started for the aunt's to find out what was the matter. It was just as well I had been in a hurry, for in another ten minutes Miss Gentles would have been on her way to Louisville, and it would have taken a week to hunt out the small place in Kentucky where she was going. Her trunk was packed, and she was sitting with her aunt in the large, ugly parlor, waiting for the expressman to come. When I walked in, following the servant, she didn't draw back her veil, but merely stood up and touched fingers with me. I saw that something was so wrong that it had to be made right at once, with no time to spare.

"You will kindly let me speak to Miss Gentles alone," I said to the aunt, who was inclined to stick. She went out of the room ungraciously.

"Now," I said, taking the girl's hand and looking through her veil into her eyes, "what is the matter? Tell me."

Her eyes were large and moist, and her lips quivered. But she shut her teeth down hard and said stiffly: "Nothing whatever, Mr. Harrington. You are very kind to come to see me before I leave."

"You aren't going to put me off with any such smooth answer as that," I said, "or you will have my company all the way you're going, wherever it may be. Tell me the straight truth, and all of it."

She began to laugh at my bluffing words, and ended with a nervous sob. After a while I learned the whole story. It seems that the man I employed talked out in the office about how he did all my work, and while I was South one of the "lady" stenographers had said something to Miss Gentles—a something she would not tell me. So she got up and took her leave, and knowing that her old aunt wouldn't want her around if she had no job, she had written some cousins in Kentucky and was going to them.

The expressman came about this time, but he didn't take her trunk. And when I left that chilly parlor we were engaged to be married. She said at the last, putting her hands on my coat: "You know I always liked you, even in the police station, Mr. Harrington—and—and I am so very, very happy, now, Van! It was terrible to think of going away. I had to, before you were due home. I was never so miserable before in my life!"

Something stirred from the bottom of my heart. I felt pitiful for all her trouble, her weakness, her struggle with a world she wasn't made for. Then she said trustingly, like a little child:—

"And you will always be good to me, as papa was with mamma, and patient, and love me a great deal, won't you? Yes, I know you will!"

I kissed her, feeling then that nothing in life could ever be like the privilege of loving and protecting this woman in her helplessness. I suppose that words like those she and I spoke then are common enough between men and women when they are in love. Yet those words have always been to me like some kind of sacred oath—the woman asking, out of her weakness, for love and protection from the one who holds all happiness and life for her, and the man, with his hasty passions, promising of the best there is in him.

Many a time in later years, when it hasn't always been easy to see things simply as it was then in our first joy, those words of hers have come back to me and given me that same soft tug at my heart. To hurt her would be to strike a child, to wring the neck of a bird that nestled in your hand. There are a good many kinds of love in this world, as there are of hate; perhaps about the best of all is this desire to protect and cherish a woman—the feeling that any man who is worth his salt has for the one he wants to marry....

Sarah walked part way back to the office with me that morning, then turned north, saying she must try to find Mrs. Dround and tell her. She was so happy she couldn't go home and sit down quietly until I got back from the office. Mrs. Dround, she knew, would be specially glad to hear the news.

"For she thinks you are a very smart young man," Sarah added shyly.

"The lady must be a mind reader, then; for in the ten years I have been with the firm I can't remember seeing her once."

"Oh, yes, she has seen you. She said so. Anyway, Jane knows all about you, you may be sure. There isn't much that goes on around her that Jane doesn't know about."

With that she gave me a happy little nod and was off to the great stone house of my boss up north on the lake. It was a windy, dirty December day, but I was very content with the world as it was and thought Chicago was the finest city in the world. As I sat down to my desk my mind began to dance in a whirl of thoughts—of old plans and new combinations. I wondered what Sarah would say to some of my schemes to make our fortune. Perhaps they would merely frighten her; for a woman is a natural conservative. I hurried up my business to get back to her and tell her that some day, not so very distant, she would be a tolerably rich woman. For now it seemed only a step into the greater things I had seen all these years afar off.

The Drounds gave us a dinner not long afterward. I reached the house early, expecting to have a little time with Sarah before the others came. Pretty soon I heard the rustle of skirts, but, instead of Sarah, a tall, thin woman in a black lace evening-dress came into the room where the servant had left me. Instantly I knew that this was the face I had seen in the carriage the morning after the anarchist riot. She was a beautiful woman, with a dark, almost foreign look. She smiled cordially as she gave me her hand.

"Sarah is not quite ready. She wants to make herself very fine—the child! And Mr. Dround is late, too. I am glad, because it will give us a few minutes to ourselves. Come into the library."

She led the way into a long, stately room, with a beautiful ceiling in wood and gold. At one end, in a little arched recess, a wood fire was blazing. There were a number of large paintings on the walls, and queer Eastern idols and curios in cabinets. Mr. Dround had the reputation of being something of a traveller and collector. My first glance around that room explained a good deal to me about the head of our firm.

Mrs. Dround seated herself near the fire, where the light from a great candelabrum filled with candles flickered above her head. Her dark eyes gleamed under the black hair; it was a puzzle of a face!

She began pretty soon to talk of Sarah in a natural but terribly shrewd way.

"I wonder, Mr. Harrington, if you know your treasure," she said, half laughing. "It takes most men years to know the woman they marry, if they ever do."

"Well, I know enough now to begin with!"

"Sarah is such a woman—tender, loyal, loving. It needs a woman to know a woman, Mr. Harrington. But she hasn't a particle of practical sense: she can't keep an account straight. She has no idea what economy is—only want or plenty. She is Southern, so Southern! Those people never think what will happen day after to-morrow."

It seemed queer that she should be telling me this kind of thing, which I should be finding out fast enough for myself before long. Perhaps she wanted to see what I would say; at any rate I replied clumsily something about not expecting to make a housekeeper of my wife.

"Yet," she said slowly, studying me, "a woman can do so much to make or mar her husband's career."

"I guess I shan't lay it up against my wife, if I don't pull out a winner."

She laughed at that.

"So you think you are strong enough to win a fight without a woman's help?"

"I've done it so far," I said, thinking a little of May.

"You have made a beginning, a good beginning," she remarked judiciously.

She was reading me like a book of large print, leaning back in her great chair, her eyes half closed, her face in shade except when the firelight flashed.

"I suppose the only way is to keep on as you begin—keep your eyes open and take everything in sight," I continued lightly.

"It depends on how much you want, perhaps."

"I want pretty much all that I can get," I retorted quickly, my eyes roving over the rich room, with an idea that I might like to put Sarah in some such place as this.

Mrs. Dround laughed a long, low laugh, as though she were speculating why I was what I was.

"Well, you are strong enough, my friend, I see. As for Sarah, love her and don't look for what you can't find."

Just then we heard Sarah's laugh. She came into the room with Mr. Dround, a smile kindling graciously all over her face. The two women, as they kissed each other, made a picture—the dark head against the light one. Then Mrs. Dround gave Sarah a cool, motherly pat on the cheek, saying:—

"I have been offering your young man some advice, Sarah."

"He doesn't need it!" Sarah answered in a flash.

"Well, I don't know that he does," Mrs. Dround laughed back, kissing her again. Every one loved Sarah in the same protecting way! Soon after this Mr. Dround came up, smiling genially at the women's talk, and gave me his hand.

I had not seen the chief out of business hours before. I had never thought him much of a business man in the office, and here, in his own house, with his pictures and books and curios, he was about the last person any one would believe spent his days over in Packington.

It wasn't to be a simple dinner that evening. Sarah whispered that Jane had insisted on inviting a lot of people, some important people, she said, to meet her young man. And presently the guests arrived,—Lardner and Steele and Jefferson with their wives, and a number of others. About the only ones I knew were big John and his very fat wife. They seemed to be as much out of the crowd as I felt I was, with all my coolness. But Sarah was perfectly at her ease. I admired her all afresh when I saw how easily and gayly she took the pretty things those men said to her.

I was more at my ease in the smoking room after dinner, where I had to tell the story about the theft of the purse in Steele's store. The shrewd old merchant laughed heartily.

"I trust, Mr. Harrington," he drawled, "that now you are going to marry you will lose your purse there in place of taking one."

They paid me considerable attention all around, and it gave me a pleasant feeling—all of which, I knew, was due to Sarah. I was nothing but a newcomer among them, but she was the daughter of an old friend. And she had a wonderful way of her own of coming close to people.

I remember that we went later to the opera, which was being given in that big barn of an exposition building on the lake front where I had had my first experience of Chicago hospitality. We were in a box, and between the acts people came in to call. Sarah introduced me to some of them, and she held a reception then and there while Mrs. Dround looked on and smiled.

I forget the opera that was given,—some French thing,—but I remember how gay the place was, and all the important people of the city whom Sarah pointed out to me. Even as a matter of business, I saw it would be a good thing to know these people. Of course, the social side of life doesn't count directly in making money, but it may count a good deal in getting close to the crowd that knows how to make money. Perhaps I began to have even a little more pride in Sarah than I had before, seeing how she knew people and counted for something with them. In the game that we were going to play together this social business might come in handily, perhaps.

In one of the intervals of the opera Mrs. Dround remarked as if her mind had been on the same idea:—

"You see Sarah's sphere, Mr. Harrington?"

"Yes," I replied. "And the girl does it tip-top!"

She laughed.

"Of course! It's in the blood."

"Well, it isn't a bad thing, some of it," I went on with pride and content. "Strauss isn't here, is he?" I asked.

"The Strausses never go anywhere, you know."

"He's the biggest of them all, too," I said partly to myself.

"You think so? Why?" she asked, her brows coming together.

"He's the biggest dog, and it's dog eat dog in our business, as all over nowadays," I replied.

"Why now more than ever before?" she asked.

"It's in the air. There's a change coming over business, and you feel it the same as you feel a shift in the wind. It's harder work fighting to live now than ever before, and it can't go on like this forever. The big dog will eat up the rest."

"And you think Strauss is our big dog?" she asked with a smile.

I saw then where she had led me, but it was too late to be less frank.

"Yes," I answered, looking her in the eyes.

"Then how should one keep out of his jaws?" she went on, playing with her fan.

"Well, you can always get out of a scrap and stay out—or—" I hesitated.

"Or?" she persisted.

"Put up such a fight that the big fellow will give you good terms to get rid of you!"

"I see. You have given me something to think about, Mr. Harrington."

"The time is coming," I went on, careless whether she repeated to Mr. Dround my views, "and mighty quick, too, when that man Strauss will have the food-products business of this country in his fist, and the rest of us will be his hired men, and take what he gives us!"

"What are you two talking about in this intimate way?" Sarah broke in.

"The future," Mrs. Dround said.

"Business," I added.

"Business!" Sarah sniffed, and I knew I had done something I ought not to do. "And Nevada singing so divinely to-night! Come, Van, I want you to meet Mr. Morehead." And I was led away from our hostess to keep me out of mischief.

On our way home after the opera Sarah and I talked of Mrs. Dround. I had never met any woman like her, and I was loud in her praise.

"Yes," Sarah admitted slowly, "she seemed to like you. But did you see how she treated the Carmichaels? Just civil, and hardly that. Nobody can understand Jane. She just does as she wants always."

"I believe she must have a great head for business. If she were in Henry I.'s shoes—"

"I don't see why you say that! I am sure you never hear the least word about business in their house."

I smiled at Sarah's little show of temper, as she continued:—

"Anyway, it would be strange if she didn't know something about money-making. Her father was old Joe Sanson—they say he was a half-breed and made his money trading with the Indians and getting Government lands. Father used to tell stories about him. We heard that he left her a great deal of money, but nobody knows much about her or her affairs. She's so silent."

"I didn't find her so."

Sarah apparently did not altogether share my enthusiasm for Mrs. Dround.

"Tell me," she demanded, "just what she said to you, every word."

"I can't. She talks with her eyes, most."

"Oh, I hate to have men discuss business with women. It is such bad taste!"

"Why, Sarah, business is the whole thing for me. There isn't anything else I can talk about except you."

"Talk about me, then. I shall have to keep you out of Jane's way. I don't want you to talk to her about things I don't understand."

"Why not?"

She shivered and drew me closer to her.

"Because, Jane—I am afraid of Jane. She is so strong, and I am so weak. If she wanted you, or anybody, she would take you."

For all reply to this nonsense I kissed her good night.