The building was not what the changeful city defined
as a modern one, and the dusty wooden stairway, as
seen from the pavement, disappeared upward into a
smoky darkness. So would the footsteps of a
girl ascending there lead to a hideous obscurity, Alice
thought; an obscurity as dreary and as permanent as
death. And like dry leaves falling about her
she saw her wintry imaginings in the May air:
pretty girls turning into withered creatures as they
worked at typing-machines; old maids “taking
dictation” from men with double chins; Alice
saw old maids of a dozen different kinds “taking
dictation.” Her mind’s eye was crowded
with them, as it always was when she passed that stairway
entrance; and though they were all different from
one another, all of them looked a little like herself.
She hated the place, and yet she seldom hurried by
it or averted her eyes. It had an unpleasant
fascination for her, and a mysterious reproach, which
she did not seek to fathom. She walked on thoughtfully
to-day; and when, at the next corner, she turned into
the street that led toward home, she was given a surprise.
Arthur Russell came rapidly from behind her, lifting
his hat as she saw him.
“Are you walking north, Miss Adams?” he
asked. “Do you mind if I walk with you?”
She was not delighted, but seemed so. “How
charming!” she cried, giving him a little flourish
of the shapely hands; and then, because she wondered
if he had seen her coming out of the tobacco-shop,
she laughed and added, “I’ve just been
on the most ridiculous errand!”
“What was that?”
“To order some cigars for my father. He’s
been quite ill, poor man, and he’s so particular—but
what in the world do I know about cigars?”
Russell laughed. “Well, what do you
know about ’em? Did you select by the
price?”
“Mercy, no!” she exclaimed, and added,
with an afterthought, “Of course he wrote down
the name of the kind he wanted and I gave it to the
shopman. I could never have pronounced it.”
CHAPTER X
In her pocket as she spoke her hand rested upon the
little sack of tobacco, which responded accusingly
to the touch of her restless fingers; and she found
time to wonder why she was building up this fiction
for Mr. Arthur Russell. His discovery of Walter’s
device for whiling away the dull evening had shamed
and distressed her; but she would have suffered no
less if almost any other had been the discoverer.
In this gentleman, after hearing that he was Mildred’s
Mr. Arthur Russell, Alice felt not the slightest “personal
interest”; and there was yet to develop in her
life such a thing as an interest not personal.
At twenty-two this state of affairs is not unique.
So far as Alice was concerned Russell might have worn
a placard, “Engaged.” She looked
upon him as diners entering a restaurant look upon
tables marked “Reserved”: the glance,
slightly discontented, passes on at once. Or
so the eye of a prospector wanders querulously over
staked and established claims on the mountainside,
and seeks the virgin land beyond; unless, indeed,
the prospector be dishonest. But Alice was no
claim-jumper—so long as the notice of ownership
was plainly posted.
