She stepped about mentally among the innumerable details of her plans with her usual orderly mastery of them, her usual animated interest in them, her usual unquestioning acceptance of them as important. From them she went on to plans for a series of educational talks to her salesgirls about the fabrics and styles and fine points of their merchandise. She wished she could do the same thing for the girls in the Ladies’ Waist and Sweater Department. There were some such bright girls there, but so ignorant of their business. They’d pick it up in no time if they had the chance, if she were allowed to. …
Why! With a tremor all over her, she wondered if some time she might not be not only head of her own department, but superintendent for all that floor. By a flash of prescience she suddenly knew as she lay there alone in the quiet that the road to advancement lay open before her, that she could step along surely and steadily to success and take her dearly loved children with her, working for them with all her might, profoundly thankful to be able to give them what she had always so tragically and impotently wished them to have.
The wideness of this thought, the blackness of the night, the unwonted prone passivity of her energetic body, all wrought upon her to a strange softness of mood. She felt almost like a girl again … dreaming.
And that made her think of Lester. He had been in her mind more than usual of late, as she had learned more about the lives of the other women employed in the store. She was one of the older employees and almost at once the younger women had leaned on her, turned to her with confidences, and asked her advice as the women of her church had always done. But these were rougher, rawer lives into which she now looked. That haggard-eyed Mrs. Hemp, in the kitchenware department, what a horrible picture she had drawn of her relations with her husband. “He’s going with one of the girls in the collar-factory now, Mrs. Knapp. I wouldn’t put up with it a minute if it weren’t for the children. That man was unfaithful to me, Mrs. Knapp, six months after we were married, and my first baby on the way. And it’s been a new girl for him ever since whenever he got tired of the old one.” And Margaret Donahue, she that read novels on the sly, but never would look at a man, what had she said? “They make me sick,” she declared briefly with an expression on her young face which Mrs. Knapp would have given a good deal not to have seen. “I’d no more let a man come near me than a toad. I’ve seen too much of what Papa does to Mama.”
And the woman who scrubbed the floors, that evening she had come to beg Mrs. Knapp to let her sleep at the store, under a counter, in the toilet-room, anywhere, so she would not have to go home. “You’re a married woman yourself, Mrs. Knapp,” she had said. “You know what men are like. Judd is in one of his crazy spells! I’m afraid to go home till he gets over it. Honest I am, Mrs. Knapp. Let me stay here! I don’t care where! I’ll sit up all night in a chair if you’ll only let me stay.”
Eva had brought her home and let her sleep on a mattress on the floor in her own room. She had felt an immense horrified pity for her; but she had hated her for that phrase, “You are a married woman, Mrs. Knapp. You know what men are like!” Did she think for a minute that Lester Knapp was that kind of a brute! Couldn’t she see by looking at him that he was a million times too fine to … she hated the woman again tonight as she thought of it, and the thought brought up before her all that Lester had been to her.
No woman could have better reason than she to trust the delicacy, the warm loving-heartedness, the self-control, the innate decency of a man. They had been married for fourteen years, and from the sweet, sweet early days of their young honeymoon when, ignorant and innocent both of them, they had stumbled their way towards each other, she had never known a single instant of this poisonous atmosphere of suspicion and hate and endured violence which these other women apparently took for granted as the inevitable relationship of husband and wife. How good Lester had been to her! She had not appreciated it. She had not really thought of it. It had never occurred to her that he might be anything else.
And how good to the children! Never an impatient word, like most men. He was the best father in the world. Not another man she knew could have endured it to be so shut up with the children. How faithfully he had tried to take her place, now that she could not be in her rightful position with them. What lovely memories the children would have of their father, always! Was it possible he was of the same flesh and blood as Ellen O’Hern’s father who never, so Ellen said, passed one of his children without aiming a blow at it.
The overflowing of this affection for Lester which had been slowly rising for weeks; her deep thankfulness for what she would be able to do for the children … she found herself trembling in her bed. She felt an impulsive longing to share her emotion with Lester, to put her arms about his neck and let him know that she did not take his loyalty, his gentleness, his faithfulness, his fineness, so coldly for granted as she had seemed. She had been so unhappy
