She heard him to the end, one hand supporting her cheek, the other drawing aimless pencil marks on the desk blotter. His request was hopeless, she knew; even if Clark had wanted to return the money, it had gone long ago in overhead and in payments to the owners of the land. No one could be compelled to return any part of the payment MacAdams had made on the contract he had signed. Clearly before her eyes rose the picture of the little tract office, the smoky oil lamp, Nichols in his chair, and she herself awaiting the word from MacAdams’ lips that would decide her fate and Bert’s. Parrot-like words, repeated many times, resaid themselves. “I’m sorry. Of course you know that in any large tract of land there will be a few poor pieces. I acted in perfectly good faith; you saw the land, examined it—” She met MacAdams’s eyes. “I’ll give back all the money I made on it,” she said.
She wrote a check for six hundred dollars, blotted it carefully, handed it to him. His stern face was as tremulous as water blown upon by the wind, but he said nothing, shaking her hand with a force that hurt and going away quickly with the check. After the door closed behind him she remembered that she had got only three hundred dollars from the sale. The remainder had gone to cover Bert’s debts. At this, shaken by emotions, she laughed aloud.
“Well, anyway, now you’ll have plenty to do!” she said to herself. “Now you’ll get out and scurry for money to live on!” She felt a momentary chill of panic, but there was exhilaration in it.
She would not return to selling land. Her determination was reinforced by the possibility that if she did she would find herself penniless before she had made a sale. No, she must earn money in some other way. She walked slowly home, wrapped in abstraction, searching her mind for an idea. It was like gazing at the blankness of a cloudless sky, but her self-confidence did not waver. All about her men no wiser, no better equipped than she, were making money.
Sitting at the walnut desk in her sunny living-room she drew a sheet of paper before her and prepared to take stock of her equipment. Her thoughts became clearer when they were written. But after looking for some time at the blank sheet, she began carefully to draw interlacing circles upon it. There seemed nothing to write.
She was twenty-six years old. She had been working for eight years. Telegraphing was out of the question; she would not go back to that. Her four years of selling land had brought her nothing but a knowledge of human minds, a certain cleverness in handling them, and a distaste for doing it. And advertising. She could write advertisements; she had records in dollars and cents that proved it. What she needed was an idea, something novel, striking and soundly valuable, with which to attack an advertiser. Her mind remained quite blank. Against the background of the swaying rose-colored curtains picture after picture rose before her vague eyes. But no idea.
Suddenly she thought of Paul, of her plan of going to Ripley, now demolished. She could not work there; if Paul suspected her difficulty he would insist upon helping her. He would be hurt by her refusal, however carefully she tried not to hurt him. “Oh, you little idiot! You have made a mess of things!” she said.
Half-formed thoughts began to scamper frantically through her mind. This was no way to face a problem, she knew. She would think no more about it until tomorrow. Smiling a little, she began a letter to Paul, a long, whimsical letter, warmed with tenderness, saying nothing and saying it charmingly. An hour later, rereading it and finding it good, she folded it into its envelope and put a tiny kiss upon the flap, smiling at herself.
Lest her perplexities come back to break the contentment of her mood, she barricaded herself against the silence of the house with a magazine. It was the Pacific Coast, a San Francisco publication of particular interest to her because of its articles on California land. She had once wished to write a series of reading-matter advertisements to be printed in it, but Clark had overruled her idea, favoring display type.
She was buried in a story of the western mining camps when from the blank depths of her mind the idea she had wanted sprang with the suddenness of an explosion. What chance contact of buried memories had produced it she could not tell, but there it was. As she considered it, it appeared now commonplace and worthless, now scintillating with bright possibilities. In the end, composing herself to sleep on the starlit porch, she decided to test it.
Early the next afternoon she arrived at the San Francisco offices of the Pacific Coast and asked to speak to the circulation manager.
She was impressed by the atmosphere of dignity and restraint in the large, bland offices. Sunshine streamed through big windows over tidy desks and filing-cabinets; girls moved about quietly, carrying sheaves of typewritten matter in smooth, ringless hands; even the click of typewriters was subdued, like the sound of well-bred voices. Her experiences of newspaper offices had not prepared her for this, and her pulses quickened at this glimpse of a strange, uncharted world.
The circulation manager was a disappointment. He was young, and desirous of
