Why, I know a little restaurant down there where a dollar looks as big as ten."
"Don, dear, you"re living too much downtown," she exclaimed somewhat petulantly. "You don"t realize it, but you are. It"s making you different--and I don"t want you different. I want you just as you used to be."
She fell back upon a straight appeal--an appeal of eyes and arms and lips.
"I miss you awfully in the afternoons," she went on, "but I"ll admit that can"t be helped. I"ll give up that much of you. But after dinner I claim you. You"re mine after dinner, Don."
She was very tender and beautiful in this mood. When he saw her like this, nothing else seemed to matter. There was no downtown or uptown; there was only she. There was nothing to do but stoop and kiss her eager lips. Which is exactly what he did.
For a moment she allowed it, and then with an excited laugh freed herself.
"Please to give me one of your cards, Don," she said.
He handed her a card, and she wrote upon it this:--
"_December sixteenth, Moore cotillion_."
CHAPTER XIII
DEAR SIR--
Don never had an opportunity to test his knowledge of the bonds about which he had laboriously acquired so much information, because within the next week all these offerings had been sold and their places taken by new securities. These contained an entirely different set of figures. It seemed to him that all his previous work was wasted. He must begin over again; and, as far as he could see, he must keep on beginning over again indefinitely. He felt that Farnsworth had deprived him of an opportunity, and this had the effect of considerably dampening his enthusiasm.
Then, too, during December and most of January Frances kept him very busy. He had never seen her so gay or so beautiful. She was like a fairy sprite ever dancing to dizzy music. He followed her in a sort of daze from dinner to dance, until the strains of music whirled through his head all day long.
The more he saw of her, the more he desired of her. In Christmas week, when every evening was filled and he was with her from eight in the evening until two and three and four the next morning, he would glance at his watch every ten minutes during the following day. The hours from nine to five were interminable. He wandered restlessly about the office, picking up paper and circular, only to drop them after an uneasy minute or two. The entire office staff faded into the background. Even Miss Winthrop receded until she became scarcely more than a figure behind a typewriter. When he was sent out by Farnsworth, he made as long an errand of it as he could. He was gone an hour, or an hour and a half, on commissions that should not have taken half the time.
It was the week of the Moore cotillion that Miss Winthrop observed the change in him. She took it to be a natural enough reaction and had half-expected it. There were very few men, her observation had told her, who could sustain themselves at their best for any length of time. This was an irritating fact, but being a fact had to be accepted. As a man he was ent.i.tled to an off day or two--possibly to an off week.
But when the second and third and fourth week pa.s.sed without any notable improvement in him, Miss Winthrop became worried.
"You ought to put him wise," she ventured to suggest to Powers.
"I?" Powers had inquired.
"Well, he seems like a pretty decent sort," she answered indifferently.
"So he is," admitted Powers, with an indifference that was decidedly more genuine than her own. It was quite clear that Powers"s interest went no further. He had a wife and two children and his own ambitions.
For a long time she saw no more of him than she saw of Blake. He nodded a good-morning when he came in, and then seemed to lose himself until noon. Where he lunched she did not know. For a while she had rather looked for him, and then, to cure herself of that, had changed her own luncheon place. At night he generally hurried out early--a bad practice in itself: at least once, Farnsworth had wanted him for something after he was gone; he had made no comment, but it was the sort of thing Farnsworth remembered. When, on the very next day, Mr.
Pendleton started home still earlier, it had required a good deal of self-control on her part not to stop him. But she did not stop him.
For one thing, Blake was at his desk at the time.
It was a week later that Miss Winthrop was called into the private office of Mr. Seagraves one afternoon. His own stenographer had been taken ill, and he wished her to finish the day. She took half a dozen letters, and then waited while Farnsworth came in for a confidential consultation upon some business matters. It was as the latter was leaving that Mr. Seagraves called him back.
"How is Pendleton getting along?" he inquired.
Miss Winthrop felt her heart stop for a beat or two. She bent over her notebook to conceal the color that was burning her cheeks. For an impersonal observer she realized they showed too much.
"I think he has ability," Farnsworth answered slowly. "He began well, but he has let down a little lately."
"That"s too bad," answered Mr. Seagraves. "I thought he would make a good man for us."
"I can tell better in another month," Mr. Farnsworth answered.
"We need another selling man," declared Mr. Seagraves.
"We do," nodded Farnsworth. "I have my eye on several we can get if Pendleton doesn"t develop."
"That"s good. Ready, Miss Winthrop."
The thing Miss Winthrop had to decide that night was whether she should allow Mr. Pendleton to stumble on to his doom or take it upon herself to warn him. She was forced to carry that problem home with her, and eat supper with it, and give up her evening to it. Whenever she thought of it from that point of view, she grew rebellious and lost her temper. There was not a single sound argument why her time and her thought should be thus monopolized by Mr. Pendleton.
She had already done what she could for him, and it had not amounted to a row of pins. She had told him to go to bed at night, so that he could get up in the morning fresh, and he had not done it. She had advised him to hustle whenever he was on an errand for Farnsworth, and of late he had loafed. She had told him to keep up to the minute on the current investments the house was offering, and to-day he probably could not have told even the names of half of them. No one could argue that it was her duty to keep after him every minute--as if he belonged to her.
And then, in spite of herself, her thoughts went back to the private office of Mr. Seagraves. She recalled the expression on the faces of the two men--an expression denoting only the most fleeting interest in the problem of Mr. Pendleton. If he braced up, well and good; if he did not, then it was only a question of selecting some one else. It was Pendleton"s affair, not theirs.
That was what every one thought except Pendleton himself--who did not think at all, because he did not know. And if no one told him, then he would never know. Some day Mr. Farnsworth would call him into the office and inform him his services were no longer needed. He would not tell him why, even if Don inquired. So, with everything almost within his grasp, Pendleton would go. Of course, he might land another place; but it was no easy thing to find the second opportunity, having failed in the first.
Yet this was all so unnecessary. Mr. Pendleton had in him everything Farnsworth wanted. If the latter could have heard him talk as she had heard him talk, he would have known this. Farnsworth ought to send him out of the office--let him get among men where he could talk. And that would come only if Mr. Pendleton could hold on here long enough. Then he _must_ hold on. He must cut out his late hours and return to his old schedule. She must get hold of him and tell him. But how?
The solution came the next morning. She decided that if she had any spare time during the day she would write him what she had to say.
When she saw him drift in from lunch at twenty minutes past one, she took the time without further ado. She s.n.a.t.c.hed a sheet of office paper, rolled it into the machine, snapped the carriage into position, and began.
MR. DONALD PENDLETON, Care Carter, Rand & Seagraves, New York, N.Y.
_Dear Sir_:--
Of course it is none of my business whether you get fired or not; but, even if it isn"t, I like to see a man have fair warning.
Farnsworth doesn"t think that way. He gives a man all the rope he wants and lets him hang himself. That is just what he"s doing with you. I had a tip straight from the inside the other day that if you keep on as you have for the last six weeks you will last here just about another month. That isn"t a guess, either; it"s right from headquarters.
For all I know, this is what you want; but if it is, I"d rather resign on my own account than be asked to resign. It looks better, and helps you with the next job. Most men downtown have a prejudice against a man who has been fired.
You needn"t ask me where I got my information, because I won"t tell you. I"ve no business to tell you this much. What you want to remember is that Farnsworth knows every time you get in from lunch twenty minutes late, as you did to-day; and he knows when you get in late in the morning, as you have eleven times now; and he knows when you take an hour and a half for a half-hour errand, as you have seven times; and he knows when you"re in here half-dead, as you"ve been all the time; and he knows what you don"t know about what you ought to know. And no one has to tell him, either. He gets it by instinct.
So you needn"t say no one warned you, and please don"t expect me to tell you anything more, because I don"t know anything more. I am,
Respectfully yours, SARAH K. WINTHROP.
She addressed this to the Harvard Club, and posted it that night on her way home. It freed her of a certain responsibility, and so helped her to enjoy a very good dinner.
CHAPTER XIV