“To be continued in our next?” queried C.
“If you are not in a cross mood,” replied Nattie.
“Now that is a very unkind suggestion, after my abject apology. But, although our acquaintance had a grave re-hearse-al, I trust it will have a happy ending!”
Nattie frowned.
“If you will promise never to say ‘grave,’ ‘hearse,’ or anything in the undertaking line, I will agree never to say ‘cross!’ ” she said.
“The undertaking will not be difficult; with all my heart!” C answered, and with this mutual understanding they bade each other “good night.”
“There certainly is something romantic in talking to a mysterious person, unseen, and miles away!” thought Nattie, as she put on her hat. “But I would really like to know whether my new friend employs a tailor or a dressmaker!”
Was Nattie conscious of a feeling that it would add to the zest of the romantic acquaintance should the distant C be entitled to the use of the masculine pronoun?
Perhaps so! For Nattie was human, and was only nineteen!
II
At the Hotel Norman
Miss Nattie Rogers, telegraph operator, lived, as it were, in two worlds. The one her office, dingy and curtailed as to proportions, but from whence she could wander away through the medium of that slender telegraph wire, on a sort of electric wings, to distant cities and towns; where, although alone all day, she did not lack social intercourse, and where she could amuse herself if she chose, by listening to and speculating upon the many messages of joy or of sorrow, of business and of pleasure, constantly going over the wire. But the other world in which Miss Rogers lived was very different; the world bounded by the four walls of a back room at Miss Betsey Kling’s. It must be confessed that there are more pleasing views than sheds in greater or less degrees of dilapidation, a sickly grapevine, a line of flapping sheets, an overflowing ash barrel; sweeter sounds than the dulcet notes of old rag-men, the serenades of musical cats, or the strains of a cornet played upon at intervals from nine p.m. to twelve, with the evident purpose of exhausting superfluous air in the performer’s lungs. Perhaps, too, there was more agreeable company possible than Miss Betsey Kling.
Therefore, in the evening, Sunday and holiday, if not in the telegraphic world of Miss Rogers, loneliness, and the unpleasant sensation known as “blues” are not uncommon.
Miss Betsey Kling, who, although in reduced circumstances, boasted of certain “blue blood,” inherited from dead and gone ancestors—who perhaps would have been surprised could they have known at this late day how very genteel they were in life—rented a flat in Hotel Norman, on the second floor, of which she let one room; not on account of the weekly emolument received therefrom, ah, no! but “for the sake of having someone for company.” In this respect she was truly a contrast to Mrs. Simonson, a hundred and seventy-five pound widow, who lived in the remaining suite of that floor, and who let every room she possibly could, in order, as she frankly confessed, to “make both ends meet.” For a constant struggle with the “ways and means” whereby to live had quite annihilated any superfluous gentility Mrs. Simonson might have had, excepting only one lingering remnant, that would never allow her to hang in the window one of those cheaply conspicuous placards, announcing:
“Rooms to Let.”
Miss Betsey Kling was a spinster—not because she liked it, but on account of circumstances over which she had no control—and her principal object in life, outside of the never-expressed, but much thought-of one of finding her other self, like her, astray, was to keep watch and ward over the affairs of the occupants of neighboring flats, and see that they conducted themselves with the propriety becoming the neighbors of so very genteel and unexceptionable a person as Miss Betsey Kling. In pursuit of this occupation she was addicted to sudden and silent appearances, much after the manner of materialized spirits, at windows opening into the hall, and doors carelessly left ajar. She was, however, afflicted with a chronic cold, that somewhat interfered with her ability to become a first-class listener, on account of its producing an incessant sniffle and spasms of violent sneezing.
Miss Rogers going home to that back room of hers, found herself still pondering upon the probable sex of C. Rather to her own chagrin, when she caught her thoughts thus straying, too; for she had a certain scorn of anything pertaining to trivial sentiment. A little scorn of herself she also had sometimes. In fact, her desires reached beyond the obtaining of the everyday commonplaces with which so many are content to fill their lives, and she possessed an ambition too dominant to allow her to be content with the dead level of life. Therefore it was that any happy hours of forgetfulness of all but the present, that sometimes came in her way, were often followed by others of unrest and dissatisfaction. There were certain dreams she indulged in of the future, now hopefully, now utterly disheartened, that she was so far away from their realization. These dreams were of fame, of fame as an authoress. Whether it was the true genius stirring within her, or that most unfortunate of all things, an unconquerable desire without the talent to rise above mediocrity, time alone could tell.
Compelled by the failure and subsequent death of her father to support herself, or become a burden upon her mother, whose now scanty means barely sufficed for herself and two younger children, Nattie chose the more independent, but harder course. For she was not the kind of girl to sit down and wait for someone to come along and marry her, and relieve her of the burden of self-support. So, from a telegraph office in the country, where she learned the
