The Imaginary Marriage | Page 6

heavy ebony ruler from his desk. "I shall defend myself!"
"Don't be a fool," he said, yet took a step backwards, for there was danger in her eyes.
"Look here, you won't get another job in a hurry, and you know it. Shorthand typists are not wanted these days, the schools are turning out thousands of 'em, all more or less bad; but I--I ain't talking about that, dear--" He took a step towards her, and then recoiled, seeing her knuckles shine whitely as she gripped the ruler. "Come, be sensible!"
"Are you going to persist in this annoyance of me?" she demanded. "Can't I make you understand that I am here to do my work and for no other purpose?"
"Supposing," he said, "supposing--I--I asked you to marry me?"
He had never meant to say this, yet he had said it, for the fascination of her was on him.
"Supposing you did? Do you think I would consent to marry such a man as you?" She held her head very proudly.
"Do you mean that you would refuse?"
"Of course!"
He seemed staggered; he looked about him as one amazed. He had kept this back as the last, the supreme temptation, the very last card in his hand; and he had played it, and behold, it proved to be no trump.
"I would neither marry you nor go out with you, nor do I wish to have anything to say to you, except so far as business is concerned. As that seems impossible, it will be better for me to give you a week's notice, Mr. Slotman."
"You'll be sorry for it," he said--"infernally sorry for it. It ain't pleasant to starve, my girl!"
"I had to do it, I had to, or I could not have respected myself any longer," the girl thought, as she made her way home that evening to the boarding-house, where for two pounds a week she was fed and lodged. But to be workless! It had been the nightmare of her dreams, the haunting fear of her waking hours.
In her room at the back of the house, to which the jingle of the boarding-house piano could yet penetrate, she sat for a time in deep thought. The past had held a few friends, folk who had been kind to her. Pride had held her back; she had never asked help of any of them. She thought of the Australian uncle who had invited her to come out to him when she should leave school, and then had for some reason changed his mind and sent her a banknote for a hundred pounds instead. She had felt glad and relieved at the time, but now she regretted his decision. Yet there had been a few friends; she wrote down the names as they occurred to her.
There was old General Bartholomew, who had known her father. There was Mrs. Ransome. No, she believed now that she had heard that Mrs. Ransome was dead; perhaps the General too, yet she would risk it. There was Lady Linden, Marjorie Linden's aunt. She knew but little of her, but remembered her as at heart a kindly, though an autocratic dame. She remembered, too, that one of Lady Linden's hobbies had been to establish Working Guilds and Rural Industries, Village Crafts, and suchlike in her village. In connection with some of these there might be work for her.
She wrote to all that she could think of, a letter of which she made six facsimile copies. It was not a begging appeal, but a dignified little reminder of her existence.
"If you could assist me to obtain any work by which I might live, you would be putting me under a deep debt of gratitude," she wrote.
Before she slept that night all six letters were in the post. She wished them good luck one by one as she dropped them into the letter-box, the six sprats that had been flung into the sea of fortune. Would one of them catch for her a mackerel? She wondered.
"You'd best take back that notice," Slotman said to her the next morning. "You won't find it so precious easy to find a job, my girl; and, after all, what have I done?"
"Annoyed me, insulted me ever since I came here," she said quietly. "And of course I shall not stay!"
"Insulted you! Is it an insult to ask you to be my wife?"
"It seems so to me," she said quietly. "If you had meant that--at first--it would have been different; now it is only an insult!"
Three days passed, and there came answers. She had been right, Mrs. Ransome was dead, and there was no one who could do anything for Miss Meredyth.
General Bartholomew was at Harrogate, and her letter had been sent on to him there, wrote a polite secretary. And then there came a letter that warmed