Chapter IV

Waking, Melissa always wondered just what repaid one for the repetitional effort involved in beginning a new day. Days, after all, were so hopelessly alike ... one opened one’s eyes on the same unlovely prospect on which one had aloofly closed them, the night before ... dull walls, dull ceiling, sunless, grayish window ... one’s clothes in a neat, limp heap on a straight-backed chair ... one’s shoes straightly placed on the floor. One yawned--and stretched--and felt one’s courage fainting within one.

After which, one got out of bed and did all the usual things in the usual way. Because that was life.

Melissa used to say over to herself, sometimes, between putting on the stockings she had washed out the night before, and brushing her blue serge frock and inspecting her gloves for wear and tear, a quaint dispassionate bit of verse she had found in a volume of Housman’s. It made her feel no happier but she inferred from it that somewhere her misery had company--that certain others no less than she failed of achieving a morning face.... She cared deeply for Mr. Housman, she went about her room with almost a tenderness in her heart for him while she murmured sardonically:

“‘Yonder see the morning blink;
The sun is up, and so must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why!’”

Melissa didn’t know why. But she made haste just the same. Out of bed morning after morning at seven. Into her clothes, groomed to a hair, by eight.... Why? To what end? Like a squirrel on a wheel--or a donkey on a treadmill! Mr. Housman said it neatly:

“‘Oh, often have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest;
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.’”

Coffee and a roll at eight-fifteen, in the alien precincts of the dining-room downstairs--that long, narrow, cheerless dining-room where if a stain appeared on the cloth on Monday, it abode ruthlessly till Wednesday ... where the ghosts of legs of lamb wrestled waveringly but undyingly with the ghosts of Hamburger steak and pork chops, from one week-end to another.... Melissa loathed that dining-room. And ate her breakfast in it every morning.

On the Monday after her astounding outburst before the Marchesa, she was out of the place and down the brownstone steps by twenty-five minutes of nine--which gave her an easy margin. At nine precisely she removed the cover from her machine, laid a newly sharpened pencil on the table within reach, ran her fingers through her hair with a small, swift desperate gesture and dove into the day’s work ... a mute, inglorious rebel, with a speed of many words a minute.

Not that she disliked her work particularly ... only she felt in more definitely bitter moments, as if she fed herself daily into a hopper ... cut herself daily into neat small pieces for the purposes of feeding ... and saw nothing come out, ever--except a weekly pay-envelope, none too full, at that.

There were letters to be taken that morning, a dull, uninteresting sheaf of them, beginning largely, “Re yours of the seventeenth instant--” and ending for the most part ... “We would appreciate the courtesy of an early reply”--or something as dramatic.

Melissa was good at letters. The junior member of the firm for which she worked--(it was a prosperous book-shop, with a publishing business of its own, on the side) always insisted upon having her and if she stayed away a day or so in case of colds or other ailments, was flatteringly inclined to be aggrieved about it. However, his grievance was of the most impersonal and unalluring sort--concerned chiefly with the fact that Melissa could both spell and punctuate, unassisted ... and as he himself was blond, stout and perceptibly bald, with a wife and three children somewhere in Yonkers, Melissa took small comfort from his attachment.

He was to her, to be quite frank about it, a commercial primrose upon the brim of the river of finance--nothing more. Not even conspicuously yellow.

She took his letters, therefore, with one ear, as it were. Efficiently enough at that. But scarcely conscious of his plump, ruddy, English-tailored person. As he, she felt, was scarcely conscious of her.

“That will do, thank you, Miss Wayne,” he said, when the clock showed noon.

Melissa rose, notebook and pencil in hand.

“Can you have those ready for me by three o’clock?”

“Yes, Mr. Bennett.”

“Good! Are you going out to lunch, now?”

“If you don’t mind--it’s my regular time.”

“H’m’m!” said Mr. Bennett--“very well.”

He wasn’t going to ask her to lunch with him--not being a tired business man out of one of his own books. He merely asked for the sake of knowing her approximate working-time between then and three o’clock. As Melissa very well knew.

Putting on her hat in the outer office, dusting a bit of powder over her straight well-bred nose, she wondered vaguely why men in stories always endeavored to turn their unsuspecting typists from the path of virtue--why men in offices so seldom did.

Not that she wanted to be turned--or would remotely have considered such a man--but the question presented itself.

Beside her at the next desk, a brown-haired young woman with more opulence of outline than the present-day fashion demands, inquired amiably: “Going out to lunch, Miss Wayne?”

“Yes,” said Melissa.

“Wait half a second and I’ll go with you.”

Melissa waited half a second, five minutes, to be exact, and the brown-haired one eventually went with her, to a little place around the corner.... “Luncheon, Tea and Dinner.... Southern Cooking.”

It wasn’t in the least Southern Cooking, as Melissa, who had been born in Alabama and lived there till she was twelve, very well knew--but it sufficed.

Pea soup, fricasseed chicken, an apple dumpling, a cup of tea.

“I’m putting on pounds,” said Melissa’s companion mournfully--“yes--cream--no lemon for me!”

To Melissa she added with obvious respect--“Don’t have to diet--do you, Miss Wayne?”

Melissa said briefly that she didn’t.

Miss Martin sighed unaffectedly.

“I bet you can go into a store, put on a sixteen-year-old model and walk out in it--without an alteration.”

“When I can find a sixteen-year-old model worth putting on,” said Melissa.

The other stared--“Aren’t the flappers snappy enough for you?”

“Oh, quite!” said Melissa--disdaining to elucidate.

“Well--I’ve always worn a thirty-eight,” said Miss Martin frankly, “but it’s got to be a forty, pretty soon.” She added with a look in which coyness and modest pride were inextinguishably blent--“Lucky my best young man is from the country....”

“Why?” asked Melissa politely.

“Oh,” said Miss Martin, “country boys always like a girl to be--well,--_you_ know! ... kind of fine-looking.”

“Of course,” said Melissa. She ate her luncheon doggedly.

“That darned office!” said Miss Martin. “I get so hungry working all morning, I eat too much every day of my life--and that’s a fact.”

It was a fact--obviously.

“You don’t care much for men, do you, Miss Wayne?” asked Miss Martin suddenly.

“Why?” fenced Melissa, curiously startled.

“Oh--_you_ know--you can kind of feel when a girl does--or doesn’t. You have that sort of indifferent, up-stage look, when a man’s around.”

“Do you mean--I look like--an old maid?” asked Melissa directly.

“Oh, no--nothing like that, I’m sure!” Miss Martin denied with earnestness a trifle overdone.

Conversation during the rest of the luncheon sagged unhappily but irretrievably.

Melissa was painfully certain, although she insisted to herself it made no difference one way or the other, that Miss Martin had meant just that. Coming on top of a twenty-fifth birthday like the one of the day before, such comment was fairly disconcerting.

Indifferent ... upstage ... Melissa! With the heart in her breast one dully thudding ache for beauty and romance she wanted, and was apparently never to attain.

She went back to the office outwardly cold and quiet--inwardly fevered with an unbearable discontent. She finished Mr. Bennett’s letters and took them in to him. She worked till six over other letters, unexpectedly thrust upon her. She finished the day with her head tired and her hands shaking. And as a crowning ignominy, Miss Martin apologized.

“Of course--anybody can see you’re young enough,” said Miss Martin--(she was thirty, herself). “I expect you’re just what they call a woman’s woman.”

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” said Melissa. She could have slain the stylish stout girl by slow torture, the most approved methods--involving thumbscrews if necessary.

All the way back to her room, through the chilly gathering dusk she was thinking in a kind of tired fury--“I’m a fool to go on with it.... I’m a fool to let life choke me, this way....”

She shut her door at last, took off her hat and flung it on the bed, dropped in a chair and pressed the tips of her fingers hard upon her aching eyes.... There was a letter for her. It lay in her lap unopened till the tide of her wretchedness ebbed a little. It appeared eventually to be a crested letter, written in a fine thin spidery hand--across two pages of bluish note-paper.

“My dear Miss Wayne”--it said--“Won’t you come in and see me, Wednesday afternoon, about five o’clock. I have something I should like to discuss with you. If this is not convenient you might suggest a time which will be. Cordially ...” of all people in the world ... the Marchesa di Ricci.

“You see--” said Melissa to herself unhappily--“you shouldn’t have talked...! She wants to do something for you now--get you into a working-girls’ club--or something of the sort ... give you good advice. This is terrible! And it’s all my own fault.... I’m going to be patronized ... she wants to cheer me....”

Melissa hadn’t, of course, the least idea what form the cheering might take. She shrank from it--purely on instinct.

Nevertheless she wrote the Marchesa a note in reply, in which she said--“I shall be very glad to come Wednesday” ... and groaned as she mailed the thing.

Between Monday and Wednesday she visualized every kind of philanthropic ghastliness without, however, acquiring courage to say she wouldn’t go. Wednesday or another day ... why not Wednesday?

“I can always refuse--whatever it is,” thought Melissa grimly--and went forward in her most forbidding manner to meet it.