"They are for you," he said. "It is my first Christmas present to you; but I hope it won"t be the last."
Nannie"s heart beat so that she could almost hear it. "Oh, thank you,"
she said breathlessly; "they"re so beautiful."
But she did not know how rare they were, nor how expensive until she wore them in Mary"s room that night.
"Where did you get them, Nannie?"
"Mr. Knox gave them to me."
There was dead silence, then Mary said: "Nannie, you ought not to take them."
"Why not?"
"They cost such an awful lot, Nannie. They look simple, but they aren"t.
The carving is exquisite."
"Well, he gave you beads, Mary."
Mary"s face was turned away. "It was different. I have been such a long time in the office."
"I don"t think it is much different, and I don"t see how I can give them back, Mary."
Mary did not argue, but when a little later Nannie told of her broken engagement, Mary said sharply: "But, Nannie--why?"
"Well, mother doesn"t care much for the idea. She--she thinks a girl is much better off to keep on at the office."
Mary was lying in her long chair under the lamp. She had a cushion under her head, and her hand shaded her eyes. "Did--Mr. Knox have anything to do with it?"
"What makes you ask that, Mary?"
"Did he?"
"Well, yes. You know what I told you; he thinks I"d be--wasted."
"On d.i.c.k?"
"Yes."
Mary lay for a long time with her hand over her eyes; then she said: "If you don"t marry d.i.c.k, what about your future, Nannie?"
"There"s time enough to think about that. And--and I can wait."
"For what?"
Nannie blushed and laughed a little. "Prince Charming."
After that there was a silence, out of which Nannie asked: "Does your head ache, Mary?"
"A little."
"Can"t I get you something?"
"No. After I"ve rested a bit I"ll take a walk."
Mary"s walk led her by the lighted shop windows. The air was keen and cold and helped her head. But it did not help her heart. She had a sense of suffocation when she thought of Nannie.
She stopped in front of one of the shops. There were dolls in the window, charming, round-eyed, ringleted. One of them was especially captivating, with fat blond curls, fat legs, blue silk socks and slippers, crisp frills and a broad blue hat.
"How I should have loved her when I was a little girl," was Mary"s thought as she stood looking in. Then: "How a child of my own would have loved her."
She made up her mind that she would buy the doll--in the morning when the shop opened. It was a whimsical thing to do, to give herself a doll at her time of life. But it would be in a sense symbolic. She had no child to which to give it; she would give it to the child who was once herself.
She came home with a lighter heart and with the knowledge of what she had to do. She put on her blue house coat and sat down to her desk with its embossed leather fittings, and there under the lovely, lamp which Kingdon Knox had given her she wrote to Nannie.
She gave the letter to Nannie the next morning. "I want you to read it when you are all alone. Then tear it up. It must always be just between you and me, Nannie."
Nannie read the letter in the lunch hour. She got her lunch at a cafeteria and there was a rest room. It was very quiet and she had a corner to herself. She wondered what Mary had to say to her, and why she didn"t talk it out instead of writing about it.
But Mary had felt that she could not trust herself to speak. There would have been Nannie"s eyes to meet, questions to answer; and this meant so much. Paper and pen were impersonal.
"It isn"t easy to talk such things out, Nannie. I should never have written this if I had not realized last night that your feet were following the path which my own have followed for fifteen years.
And I knew that you were envying me and wanting to be like me; and I am saying what I shall say in this letter so that I may save you, Nannie.
"When I first came into Mr. Knox"s office I was young like you, and I had a lover, young and fine like d.i.c.k, and he satisfied me. We had our plans--of a home and the happiness we should have together.
If I had married him, I should now have sons and daughters growing up about me, and when Christmas came there would be a tree and young faces smiling, and my husband, smiling.
"But Mr. Knox talked to me as he talked to you. He told me, too, to wait--for Prince Charming. He told me I was too fine to be wasted.
He hinted that the man I was planning to marry was a plain fellow, not good enough for me. He talked and I listened. He opened vistas.
I saw myself raised to a different sphere by some man like Mr.
Knox--just as well groomed, just as distinguished, just as rich and wonderful.
"But such men don"t come often into the lives of girls like you and me, Nannie. I know that now. I did not know it then. But Mr. Knox should have known it. Yet he held out the hope; and at last he robbed me of my future, of the little home, my fine, strong husband. He robbed me of my woman"s heritage of a child in my arms.
"And in return he gave me--nothing. I have found in the years that I have been with him that he likes to be admired and looked up to by pretty women. He likes to mold us into something exquisite and ornamental, he likes to feel that he has molded us. He likes to see our blushes. All these years that I have been with him, he has liked to feel that I looked upon him as the ideal toward which all my girlish dreams tended.
"He is not in love with me, and I am not in love with him. But he has always known that if he had been free and had wooed me, I should have felt that King Cophetua had come to the beggar maid.
Yet, too late, I can see that if he had been free he would never have wooed me. His ambition would have carried him up and beyond anything I can ever hope to be, and he would have sought some woman of his own circle who would have contributed to his material success.
"And now he is trying to spoil your life, Nannie--to make you discontented with your future with d.i.c.k. You look at him and see in your life some day a Prince Charming. But I tell you this, Nannie, that Prince Charming will never come. And after a time all you will have to show for the years that you have spent in the office will be just a pretty room, a few bits of wood and leather and bronze in exchange for warm, human happiness, clinging hands, a husband like d.i.c.k, who adores you, who comes home at night, eager--for you!
"You can have all this--and I have lost it. And there isn"t much ahead of me. I shan"t always be ornamental, and then Mr. Knox will let me drop out of his life, as he has let others drop out. And there"ll be loneliness and old age and--nothing else.
"Oh, Nannie, I want you to marry d.i.c.k. I want you to know that all the rest is dust and ashes. I feel tired and old; and when I think of your youth, and beauty, I want d.i.c.k to have it, not Mr. Knox, who will flatter and--forget.
"Tear this letter up, Nannie. It hasn"t been easy to write. I don"t want anybody but you to read it."
But Nannie did not tear it up.