“Yes, dear, most people do think we’re sisters,” Mrs. Latimer said complacently, when Helen spoke of the resemblance.
“We have awful good times together, don’t we, Momma?” Louise added, her arm around her mother’s waist, and Helen felt a pang at the fondness of the reply. “We certainly do, kiddie.”
It was a careless, happy-go-lucky household. Dinner was scrambled together somehow, with much opening of cans, in a neglected, dingy kitchen. Helen and Louise washed the dishes while momma stirred the creamed chicken. It was fun to wash dishes again and to set the table, and Helen could imagine herself one of the family while she listened to their intimate chatter. They had had tea down town; there was mention of someone’s new car, somebody’s diamonds; Louise had seen a lavallière in a jeweler’s shop; she teased her mother to buy it for her, and her mother said fondly, “Well, honey-baby, we’ll see.”
They had hardly begun to eat when the telephone-bell rang, and momma, answering it, was gone for some time. They caught scraps of bantering talk and Louise wondered, “Who’s that she’s jollying now?” She sprang up with a cry of delight when momma came back to announce that the crowd was going to the beach.
There was a scramble to dress. Helen, hooking their gowns in the cluttered bedroom, saw dresser drawers overflowing with sheer underwear, silk stockings, bits of ribbon, crushed hat-trimmings, and plumes. Louise brushed her eyebrows with a tiny brush, rubbed her nails with a buffer, dabbed carefully at her lips with a lipstick. Helen hoped that she did not show her surprise at these novel details of the toilet. They had taken it for granted she was going to the beach with them. Their surprise and regret were genuine when she said she must go to work.
“Oh, what do you want to do that for?” Louise pouted. “You look all right.” She said it doubtfully, then brightened. “I’ll lend you some of my things. You’d be perfectly stunning dressed up. Wouldn’t she be stunning, Momma? You’ve got lovely hair and that baby stare of yours. All you need’s a dress and a little—Isn’t it, Momma?”
Her mother agreed warmly. Helen glowed under their praise and was deeply grateful for their interest in her. She wanted very much to go with them, and when she stood on the sidewalk watching them depart in a big red automobile, amidst a chorus of gay voices, she felt chilled and lonely.
They were lovely to be so friendly to her, she thought, while she went soberly to work. She felt that she must in some way return their kindness, and after discarding a number of plans she decided to take them both to a matinée.
It was Louise, at their third meeting, who suggested that she come to live with them. “What do you know, Momma, Helen’s living in some awful hole all alone. Why couldn’t she come in with us? There’s loads of room. She could sleep with me. Momma, why not?”
Her mother, smiling lazily, said:
“Well, if you kids want to, I don’t care.” Helen was delighted by the prospect. It was arranged that she should pay one third of the expenses, and Louise cried joyfully: “Now, Momma, you’ve got to get my lavallière!”
The next afternoon Helen packed her bag and left the room on Gough Street. Her feet wanted to dance when she went down the narrow stairs for the last time and let herself out into the windy sunshine.
It was maddening to find herself so tied down by her work. In the early mornings, dragging herself from bed, she left Louise drowsy among the pillows and saw while she dressed the tantalizing signs of last night’s gaiety in the dress flung over a chair, the scattered slippers and silk stockings. She came home at midnight to a dark, silent apartment, letting herself in with a latchkey to find the dinner dishes still unwashed and spatterings of powder on the bedroom carpet, where street shoes and a discarded petticoat were tangled together. She enjoyed putting things in order, pretending the place was her own while she did it, but she was lonely. Later she awoke to blink at Louise, sitting half undressed on the edge of the bed, rubbing her face with cold-cream, and to listen sleepily to her chatter.
“You’ll be a long time dead, kiddie,” momma said affectionately. “What’s the use of being a dead one till you have to?” Helen’s youth cried that momma was right. But she knew too well the miseries of being penniless; she dared not give up a job. A chance remark, flung out on the endless flow of Louise’s gossip, offered the solution. “What do you know about that boob girl at M.X. office? She’s picked a chauffeur in a garden of millionaires, and she’s going to quit work and marry him!”
Helen’s heart leaped. It was her chance. When she confronted Mr. Bryant across the main-office counter the next morning her hands trembled, but her whole nature had hardened into a cold determination. She would get that job. It paid sixty dollars a month; the hours were from eight to four. Whether she could handle market reports or not did not matter; she would handle them.
She scored her first business triumph when she got this job, although she did not realize until many years later what a triumph it had been. She settled into her work at the Merchants’ Exchange wires with only one thought. Now she was free to live normally, to have a good time, like other girls.
The first day’s work strained her nerves to the breaking point The shouts of buyers and sellers on the floor, the impatient pounding on the counter of customers with rush messages, the whole breathless haste and excitement of the exchange, blurred into an indistinct clamor through which she heard only the slow, heavy working of the Chicago wire, tapping out a meaningless jumble of letters and fractions. She concentrated
