Chapter IV

How different the little room in the Planet office looked to Ann when she returned, with a sick heart, to her work the next morning. Everything was just the same--the geranium on its windowledge, that seemed to survive both the eddying hot air from the steampipes beneath it and the daily douche of iced drinking water; the noisily ticking inaccurate little clock; the dusty typewriter. All were the same, and there was the pile of morning letters from Love's battered henchmen. To office boy and casual reporter Ann herself seemed the usual cheerful charmer with her crisp little white collar and dark, alluring hair. Her swift, capable hands sped over the pile of letters, slitting the envelopes and sorting the outcries into some classification of her own. Outwardly nothing had altered, but everything seemed to have lost its meaning. What a desolate emptiness gaped beneath the firm routine of her daily life. She was struck by the irony of the fact that the only one in the office who seemed to notice that something was amiss was the one person whom she disliked--Mr. Sikes. He came in about something or other, and then stayed, looking at her intently.

“You look sick,” he said. “What's the matter, is the love feast getting on your nerves?”

With a queer twitching at the corners of her mouth, she forced herself to say some trifling remark. He leaned over her and put his hand on hers. She caught the strong cigarry whiff of his clothes, which sickened her.

“Too much love in the abstract,” he said, insinuatingly. “What you need is a little love in the concrete.”

If he--or any one--had spoken tenderly to her, she would have burst into tears. But the boorishness of his words was just the tonic she needed. She looked at him with flashing eyes, and was about to say: “Keep to some topic you understand.” Then she dared not say it, for now she could not run the risk of losing her job. She faced him steadily, in angry silence. He left the room, and the little green-tarnished mirror under the pigeonholes saw tears for the first time.

The irony of her position moved her cruelly when she began her task of dealing with the correspondents. Here she was, giving helpful, cheery advice, posing as all-wise in these matters, when her own love affair had come so miserably to grief. In the ill-written scrawls on scented and scalloped paper she could hear an echo of her own suffering. “Hopeless” and “Uncertain” and “Miss Eighteen” got very tender replies that day. And how she laid the lash upon “Beau Brummel” and “Disillusioned,” those self-assured young men, who had chosen that mail to contribute their views on the flirtatious and unreliable qualities of modern girls.

The bitterness of her paradoxical task became dulled as the days went on, but there were other troubles, too, to bother her. Her mother, quick and querulous to detect unhappiness, fell into one of her nervous spells, and the doctor had to be called in again. The woman-by-the-day got blood-poisoning in her arm, and could not come. The landlord gave notice of a coming raise in rent. A fat letter came from Arthur, and in a flush of passion she destroyed it unread. If it hadn't been such a fat letter, she said to herself, it wouldn't have annoyed her so to see it. But she wasn't going to wade through pages of explanation of just what he had meant. She was still cut to the quick when she remembered the cavalier and easy way in which he had scoffed at her work. And then, as time went by, she found herself moving into a new mood--no longer one of exaggerated tenderness toward her clients, but a feeling almost cynical. “They're all fools, just as I am,” she said.

One morning she found on her desk a note from the managing editor:

_Dear Miss Cupid:_

_We've made some changes in our budget, and I've been authorized to fatten your envelope $15 a week. I'm glad to do this, because the Lovelorn stuff is going big. Just keep kidding them along and everything will be fine. Maybe some day we can syndicate it. Hope this will cheer you up, don't look so blue at your friends._

_Sikes._

There had been a time when the tone and phrasing of this note might have seemed offensive, but in the numbness of despondency Ann had felt lately, it was a fine burst of rosy warmth. Thank God, she said to herself, something has broken my way at last! She wondered if she had been mistaken in Sikes, after all? Perhaps he was really a friend of hers, and she had misunderstood his odd ways.

That day at noon she went down to the cashier's department to cash a small check. There was no one in the cage, but in the adjoining compartment, behind a wall of filing cases, she could hear two girls talking. One of them said:

“I see Sikes has put through a raise for Lovelorn. Pretty soft for her, hey?”

“She'll have to give value received, I guess,” said the other. “Sikes figures if he puts that over for her, she'll fall for him. She's been stalling him for quite a while, but I suppose he's got her fixed now.”

She fled, aghast, ran down to another floor so as not to be seen, and took the elevator. Out on the street she walked mechanically along Park Row and found herself opposite St. Paul's. She wandered in and sat down on a bench. It was a chilly day, and the churchyard was nearly empty.

So this was Sikes's friendliness; and she, utterly innocent even in thought, was already the subject of vulgar office gossip. For the first time there broke in upon her, with bitter force, the knowledge that no matter how easy it may be to counsel others, few of us are wise in our own affairs.

Pitiable paradox: she, the “sympathetic adviser in matters of the heart,” had made shipwreck of her own happiness. How right Arthur had been, and how childish and mad she, to reject his just instinct. It was true: she had made use of Love for mere newspaper circulation; and now Love had died between her hands. Well, this was the end. No matter what happened, she could not go on with the job. Cold and trembling with nervousness, she returned to her desk, to finish her column for the next day.

On her typewriter lay some letters, which had come in while she was out. She opened one, and read.

_Dear Cynthia:_

_I am in great trouble, please help me. I am in love with a fellow and know he is all right and we would be very happy together. We were engaged to be married, and everything was lovely. But he objected to the work I was doing, said it was not a good job for a girl and that I ought to give it up. I knew he was right, but the way he said it made me mad. I guess I am hot-tempered and stubborn--anyway, I told him to mind his own business, and he went away. Now I am heart-broken, because I love him and I know he loves me. Tell me what to do._

_Jessie._

Ann sat looking at the cheap blue paper with the initial J gaudily embossed upon it in gilt. In the sprawling lines of unlettered handwriting she saw an exact parallel to her own unhappy rupture with Arthur. How much more clearly we can see the answer in others' tangles than in our own! Jessie, with her pathetic pretentious gilt initial, knew that she had been in the wrong, and was brave enough to want to make amends. And she--had she not been less true to Love than Jessie? Her false pride and obstinacy had brought their own punishment. Seeing the situation through Jessie's eyes, she could read her duty plain. Arthur, no doubt, was through with her forever, but she must play the game no less.

She put Jessie's letter at the head of the Lovelorn column for the next day. Under it she wrote:

_Certainly, dear Jessie, if you feel you were in the wrong, you ought to take the first step toward making up. Probably he was tactless in criticizing you, but I am sure he only did it because he had your true interest at heart. So write him a nice letter and be happy together. Your friend Cynthia hopes it will all come out all right, because she has seen other cases like this where false pride caused great suffering. If he is the right man, he will love you all the more after he gets your letter._

Ann sent up her copy to the composing room, and then going to a telephone booth she called up Fawcett and Company and asked for Mr. Caldwell.

“Mr. Caldwell's not here any longer,” said the girl.

“Serves me right,” said Ann to herself. “Can you tell me where I can find him?” she asked, wondering how it was that one so miserable could still speak in such a pleasant and apparently unconcerned tone of voice.

The Fawcett operator switched her to another wire.

“I'm sorry,” said a stenographer, “Mr. Fawcett left here about two weeks ago. He's got a job out of town--in Boston, I think. I can find out for you in the morning if you'll call again.”

“Never mind,” said Ann.

She had a horror of facing Mr. Sikes in her present wretchedness, so before she went home she wrote him a note, resigning her job, and asking permission to leave as soon as possible.

The next day she had to nerve herself to face his protests, and the friendly remarks of all the staff when the news spread. It was a hideous ordeal, but she managed to get through it smiling. But by evening she was inwardly a wreck. In her present mood, she had an instinctive longing to revisit the shabby little restaurant where she and Arthur had spent so many happy hours. She knew it would give her pain; but she felt that pain was what she needed--sharp, clean, insistent pain to ease the oppression and disgust of what she had been through. Remorse, she felt, is surgical in action: it cuts away foul tissues of the mind. She could not, without preparatory discipline, face her mother's outcry at hearing she had given up her job.