"Do you think," Hertha asked, sitting on the little straight white chair opposite Miss Wood, "do you think that it needs any special talent to be a stenographer?"

She put her question hesitatingly, playing the while with her hands, a habit that had lately come to her with the city's insistent hurry and nervous demand for quick thought. Her day at school had been a hard one and only a walk with Bob had brought back courage to face life.

"I certainly think," Miss Wood answered, "that there are plenty of stenographers in New York to-day without talent. I've had some of them work for me."

"Yes," said Hertha with a little smile, "but you wouldn't want me to be that sort!"

The a.s.sistant secretary of the a.s.sociation for Improving the Condition of the Dest.i.tute had her share of humor. Smiling back at her interlocutor she proceeded to give Hertha's question the thought it deserved.

"Where do you feel that your talent falls short?" she demanded.

"Oh, everywhere," Hertha answered vaguely, and then added, "it's all so confusing, especially when you have to hurry."

"You haven't been at work long enough to be speeded," her adviser answered. "Perhaps they aren't teaching you well."

"The others get ahead." In the answer lurked a hint of tears.

"I don't believe, then," Miss Wood said, weighing her words carefully, "that you will want to be a stenographer; that is, a stenographer whose whole time is taken up with typewriting and dictation. But you can be a secretary with only moderate skill at stenography if you have other qualifications."

"Probably I haven't got them," Hertha murmured.

"I know you have some of them." Miss Wood became emphatic now, she felt on safe ground. "You have an attractive personality. Why, I should try you in my office, if I had one of my own, the first minute I saw you!

You would be courteous to all who came in, and discreet; you wouldn't talk about your employer's business when you went home; and," looking about her, "you are orderly. Oh, you have many qualifications." The last words were vague but Miss Wood left her listener cheered and with returned self-respect. Especially was Hertha pleased that a woman, not a smirking man, expressed a desire to employ her if given the opportunity.

Unfortunately, the next day, in her tussle with a business order, she made such a hodge-podge of words that her teacher laughed. That evening she knocked at Mrs. Pickens' door.

She was welcomed cordially to a comfortable seat while her landlady hastily gathered together the bunch of newspapers that she had been looking over and threw them into a corner.

"What have you been reading about to-night?" Hertha questioned. "A young woman who doesn't know her own mind?"

"I reckon there're plenty of that sort," was the answer, "or if they do know what they want they'll never get it. I just read a modest advertis.e.m.e.nt in which a refined young woman, graduating from a school of stenography, says she wants a position with an agreeable gentleman.

Hours short. How would you like that now?"

"I might like it, but I reckon after he tried me with one of his letters he wouldn't like me."

"Nonsense, then he wouldn't be agreeable."

Hertha was silent, and Mrs. Pickens, seeing that she was in no mood for banter, asked sympathetically, "You're mighty tired, honey?"

Her voice with its southern drawl reminded Hertha poignantly of her mammy. She longed childishly to put her head on the older woman's shoulder as she would have put it on her colored mother's, and be comforted. But she remained in her seat and answered with the single word, "Discouraged."

"It's too hot to work," Mrs. Pickens said soothingly. "I've managed myself to-day to spoil ten pounds of perfectly good fruit."

"What a shame!" Hertha was alert at the disaster. "Why wasn't I here to help you! I know how to cook."

"You're a clever girl. You know the things you ought to know which is a lot more than I do, having been spoilt in my youth. And the things you don't know aren't worth worrying over."

"I don't seem to know how to earn my own living."

"Let some one, who wants to, earn it for you then."

In the silence that followed Mrs. Pickens devoutly hoped that her bluntness had not hurt d.i.c.k's cause.

"Of course I can support myself," Hertha said at length in a low voice, "I have already been a companion. I would rather do that again than just to marry for a home. How do you know you are going to like the home you get? If you're a companion you can leave it, but if you're married you're expected to stay on no matter how much you may hate every step you take and dread the thought of to-morrow!"

"Of course," Mrs. Pickens made haste to say, in some consternation, "you mustn't marry if you feel like that!"

Hertha's voice was hardly audible. "I don't feel that way about d.i.c.k to-day, but I don't know how I might feel to-morrow."

Her valley of indecision was black indeed; but Bob came to say good-night and she forgot it for a time in her happiness with the child.

June flowered with tropical luxuriance in the city park. Wonderful blue lilies, that Cleopatra might have inhaled for fragrance, floated on the little pond by the side of their less foreign white and yellow neighbors. Roses of all varieties and color grew in straight lines in the Italian garden. Rhododendrons ma.s.sed the hillside, gorgeous rose color, and honeysuckle and sweet-smelling shrubs lined the paths or clambered over the rustic arbors. There were times when Hertha, country lover that she was, sighed at the studied prettiness of it all and waxed weary at the constant stream of people who never gave Bob or herself a chance to be alone, but it was much better than the view of the East-side elevated; so, though she had made no friend whom she loved as she loved Kathleen, she did not regret her change of residence. But during each day, in the outing that she allowed herself, far back in her mind, whether feeding the ducks and goldfish or retailing a new phase in the history of Tom-of-the-Woods, there was a sense of irksome responsibility, of the necessity shortly of deciding upon the next step in life.

"I had a letter from d.i.c.k to-day," Mrs. Pickens announced to Hertha one evening in the third week of his departure.

She had not mentioned him before, except casually, since the night they had talked in her room.

"What does he say?" Hertha asked.

They were sitting out on the stoop, for the evening was a warm one.

"Oh, nothing very much," Mrs. Pickens answered, "chiefly joking about the dreadful food he gets and how glad he will be to come home."

"Men do care a lot about what they have to eat."

"They surely do. I suppose it's partly because after their work they're hungry, really hungry, and food tastes good to them. I work, too, but when I've been over this house, from top to bottom, and seen that Mary doesn't spoil everything she puts her hand to, I haven't the least desire for my dinner."

"You take it all very hard," Hertha said.

"Do I? Well, I suspect that's because I am incompetent, like Mary, and it makes me nervous and doubly anxious over everything."

"That's the way I feel in cla.s.s."

Mrs. Pickens glanced anxiously at the young girl noting how fragile-looking she had grown in the past weeks.

"You seemed so well when you came here," she said, "and now you are certainly thin. I hope it isn't my incompetence that has brought the change about."

"You know it isn't," the girl answered.

There was a pleasant silence in which neither felt the necessity of speech and then out of the fast approaching darkness Hertha asked: "Have you spent the most of your life in New York?"

"No, I only came here after my marriage. My life has been an ordinary one. A quiet girlhood, fifteen years of perfect married life, and now, a common struggle to keep from being despondent and to make both ends meet. The best for me is done."

"Fifteen years wasn't very long, was it?"

"One way it seems about fifteen minutes but another way it seems an eternity. It was all my life--I'm only existing now. And do you know,"

speaking in a low voice into the twilight, "I've never said this before, hardly to myself, but I came very near not marrying my husband. I was young and not romantically in love. He was ten years older and that seemed frightening. If it had not been for my mother, who appreciated him better than I, I doubt if I would have accepted him. Afterward, when we had lived together for months and I had given my whole heart to him, I used to waken in the night and shake with horror at the thought of what I might have lost. When I realized what we would have missed without our life together, I would grow chill with a perfectly unreasoning fear.