Helen did not answer that.
“I got a job,” she said. Her breath came quickly.
“You have? What kind of job?”
Helen told her. They were in the hall now, standing by the golden-oak hat-rack at the foot of the stairs. The children watched, wide-eyed, in the parlor door.
Perplexity and disgust struggled on Mrs. Campbell’s face.
“You think you’re going to live in Sacramento on five dollars a week?”
“I’m going to. I got to. I’ll manage somehow. I won’t go home!” Helen cried, confronting Mrs. Campbell like an antagonist.
“Oh, I don’t doubt you’ll manage!” Mrs. Campbell said cuttingly. She went down the hall, and the slam of the dining-room door shouted that she washed her hands of the whole affair.
She came up the back stairs half an hour later. Helen was sitting on the bed, her bag packed, trying to plan what to do. She had only the five dollars. It would be two weeks before she could get more money from the office. Mrs. Campbell opened the door without knocking.
“I’m going to talk this over with you,” she said, patient firmness in her tone. “Don’t you realize you can’t get a decent room and anything to eat for five dollars a week? Do you think it’s right to expect your folks to support you, poor as they are? It isn’t—”
“I don’t expect them to!” Helen cried.
“As though you didn’t have a good home to go back to,” Mrs. Campbell conveyed subtly that a well-bred girl did not interrupt while an older woman was speaking. “Now be reasonable about this, my—”
“I won’t go back,” Helen said. She lifted miserable eyes to Mrs. Campbell’s, and the expression she saw there reminded her of a horse with his ears laid back.
“Then you’ve decided, I suppose, where you are going?”
“No—I don’t know. Where could I begin to look for a—nice room that I can live in on my wages?”
Mrs. Campbell exclaimed impatiently. Her almost ruthless capability in dealing with situations did not prepare her to meet gracefully one that she could not handle. Her voice grew colder, and the smooth cheeks beneath the smooth, fair hair reddened while she continued to talk. Her arguments, her grudging attempts at persuasion, her final outburst of unconcealed anger, were futile. Helen would not go home. She meant to keep her job and to live on the wages.
“Well, then I guess you’ll have to stay here. I can’t turn you out on the streets.”
“How much would you charge for the room?” said Helen.
“Charge!” Helen flushed again at the scorn in the word.
“I couldn’t stay unless I paid you something. I’d have to do that.”
“Well, of all the ungrateful—!”
Tears came into Helen’s eyes. She knew Mrs. Campbell meant well, and though she did not like her, she wished to thank her. But she did not know how to do it without yielding somewhat to the implacable force of the older woman. She could only repeat doggedly that she must pay for the room.
She was left shaken, but with a sense of victory emphasized by Mrs. Campbell’s inarticulate exclamation as she went out. It was arranged that Helen should pay five dollars a month for the room.
But the bitterness of living in that house, on terms which she felt were charity, increased daily. She tried to make as little trouble as possible, stealing in at the back door so that no one would have to answer her ring, making her bed neatly, and slipping out early so that she would not meet any of the family. She spent her evenings at the office or at the library, where she could forget herself in books and in writing long letters. For some inexplicable reason this seemed to exasperate Mrs. Campbell, who inquired where she had been and did not hide a belief that her replies were lies. Helen felt like a suspected criminal. She would have left the house if she could have found another room that she could afford.
It was only at the office that she could breathe freely. She worked from eight in the morning to six at night, and then until the office closed at nine o’clock she could practise on the telegraph instrument behind the tables where the real wires came in. She worked hard at it, for at last she was on the road to the little station where she would work with Paul. She felt that she could never be grateful enough to Mr. Roberts for giving her the chance.
He was very kind. Often he came behind the screen where she was studying and talked to her for a long time. He was surprised at first by her working so hard. He seemed to think she had not meant to do it. But his manner was so warmly friendly that one day when he took her hand, saying, “What’s the big idea, little girl—keeping me off like this?” she told him about everything but Paul. She told him about the farm and the mortgage and the failure of the fruit crop, even, shamefaced, about Mr. Weeks’ drinking, and that she did not know what she would have done if she had not got the job. She was very grateful to him and tried to tell him so.
He said drily not to bother about that, and she felt that she had offended him. Perhaps her story had sounded as if she were begging for more money, she thought with burning cheeks. For several days he gave her a great deal of hard work to do and was cross when she made mistakes. She did her best, trying hard to please him, and he was soon very friendly again.
His was the only friendliness she found to warm her shivering spirit, and she became daily more grateful to him for it. Though she was puzzled by his displays of affectionate interest in her and his sudden cold withdrawals when she eagerly thanked him, this was only part of the bewildering atmosphere of the office, in which she felt
