Later, lights bloomed through the deepening night, and the houses became dark masses framing squares of brightness. Vaguely beyond lace curtains Helen saw a woman swaying in a rocking-chair, a group of girls gathered at a piano. From dim porches mothers called the children to bed, and at an upstairs window a shade came down like an eyelid. Helen felt alone and very lonely. She realized that she had been walking for a long time on tired feet. But she did not want to go back to the hotel. She must remind herself that tomorrow would be another hard day.
In the hotel lobby she encountered Hutchinson or Monroe. Sharpness and hardness came back then. Monroe was able to handle the smart young tool-dressers; his bland paternal manner crushed them into a paralyzing sense of their youth and crudeness. He had got hold of a tool-dresser she had canvassed and hoped to sell. That meant a fight about the commissions, in which, of course, Hutchinson backed Monroe. She was still alone, but now she was among enemies.
“You’ve got to fight!” she told herself. “Are you going to let them put it over on you because you’re a woman?” She lay awake thinking of selling arguments, talking points, ways of handling this prospect and that. Every sale brought her nearer to freedom. Some day she would have a house, with a big gray living-room, rose curtains, dozens of fine embroidered towels and tablecloths. She jerked her thoughts back to her work, angry at herself for letting them stray. But when, triumphantly, she closed the biggest sale yet—sixty acres!—she celebrated by buying a linen lunch cloth stamped in a pattern of wild roses. She sat in her room in the evenings and embroidered it beautifully with fine even stitches.
When it was finished and laundered, she folded it in tissue-paper and put it carefully away in one of the cheap, warped drawers of her bureau. Often she took it out, spreading the shining folds over the foot of her bed and looking at it with joy. It lay in her thoughts like a nucleus of a future contentment. But when her sister Mabel wrote from Masonville that she was going to marry the most wonderful man in the world, Bob Mason, “Old Man” Mason’s grandson, who was head clerk of Robertson’s store, the rose lunch cloth became something Helen could not keep. It was too keenly a symbol of all that she had missed, all that she wanted her little sister to have.
It went to Mabel in a rose-lined white box, with a letter and a check. Mabel’s letter, palpitating with happiness and awkwardly triumphant over the splendid match—“though of course it makes no difference, because I would marry him if he was the poorest man on earth, because money isn’t everything, is it?”—had suggested that Helen come home for the wedding. But this would mean facing curiosity and sympathy and whispered discussion of her own tragedy, unforgotten, she knew, in Masonville. She replied that she could not get away from her work, and read Mabel’s relief in the light regrets sprinkled through her radiant thanks for the check. “And the tablecloth is beautiful, too, one of the loveliest ones I have.”
“After all, it is good to think that it matters so little to her,” Helen thought quickly. But the letters had shown her the deep gulf time had dug between her and her girlhood, and the realization increased her loneliness. Her life went by. Business filled it, and it was empty.
One day late in the fall she came in early from the oil fields. Over the level yellow plains a sense of autumn had come, an indefinable change in the air. She felt another change, too, a vague foreboding, something altered and restless in the spirit of the men with whom she had talked. For a week she had not found a new prospect, and two sales had slipped through her fingers. She stopped at the hotel to get a newspaper and read the financial news. Then she walked down Main Street to the little office Hutchinson and Monroe had rented.
Hutchinson was there, leaning back in a chair, his feet crossed on the desk. He did not move when she came in, save to lift his eyes from the sporting page and knock the ashes from his cigar. He accepted her now as an equal in his own game, and there was respect in his voice. “Well, how’s it coming?”
“I’m going to get out of the fields,” she said. She pushed back her hat with a tired gesture and dropped into a chair.
“The hell you say! What’s wrong?” Hutchinson set up, dropping the paper, and leaned forward on the desk. His interest was almost alarmed. She was making him money.
“Territory’s gone bum. K.T.O. 25 will close down in another two weeks. The Limited’s going to stop drilling. I’m going somewhere else.”
“What! Who told you?”
“Nobody. I just doped it out.”
He was relieved. He cajoled her. She was tired, he said. She was working in a streak of bad luck. Every salesman struck it sometime. Look at him; he hadn’t made a sale in four weeks, and he hadn’t lost his nerve. Cheer up!
She had been considering a plan, and she had chosen the moment to present it to him. The obliqueness of real-estate methods had astounded her. She had always supposed that men thought and acted in straight lines, logical lines. That, she had thought, gave them their superiority over irrational womankind. But the waste and blindness of business as she had seen it had altered her opinion of them. Her plan was logical, but she did not count upon
