Part 7

"Surely some of your relatives will do something for you. I have my hands full, supporting your mother. I don't propose to have two strapping, worthless women hanging from my neck."

She bent her head lower, and remained silent.

"I warn you to bestir yourself," he went on. "I give you four months. After the first of the year you can't stay here unless you pay your share--your third."

No answer.

"You hear what I say, miss?" he demanded.

"Yes," replied she.

"If you had any sense you wouldn't wait until your last cent was gone. You'd go to New York now and get something to do."

"What?" she asked--all she could trust herself to speak.

"How should I know?" retorted he furiously. "You are a stranger to me. You've been educated, I assume. Surely there's something you can do. You've been out six years now, and have had no success, for you're neither married nor engaged. You can't call it success to be flattered and sought by people who wanted invitations to this house when it was a social center."

He paused for response from her. None came.

"You admit you are a failure?" he said sharply.

"Yes," said she.

"You must have realized it several years ago," he went on. "Instead of allowing your mother to keep on wasting money in entertaining lavishly here to give you a chance to marry, you should have been preparing yourself to earn a living." A pause. "Isn't that true, miss?"

He had a way of pronouncing the word "miss" that made it an epithet, a sneer at her unmarried and unmarriageable state. She colored, paled, murmured:

"Yes."

"Then, better late than never. You'll do well to follow my advice and go to New York and look about you."

"I'll--I'll think of it," stammered she.

And she did think of it. But in all her life she had never considered the idea of money-making. That was something for men, and for the middle and lower classes--while Hanging Rock was regarded as most noisomely middle class by fashionable people, it did not so regard itself. Money-making was not for ladies. Like all her class, she was a constant and a severe critic of the women of the lower orders who worked for her as milliners, dressmakers, shop-attendants, cooks, maids. But, as she now realized, it is one thing to pass upon the work of others; it is another thing to do work oneself. She-- There was literally nothing that she could do. Any occupation, even the most menial, was either beyond her skill or beyond her strength, or beyond both.

Suddenly she recalled that she could sing. Her prostrate spirit suddenly leaped erect. Yes, she could sing! Her voice had been praised by experts. Her singing had been in demand at charity entertainments where amateurs had to compete with professionals. Then down she dropped again. She sang well enough to know how badly she sang--the long and toilsome and expensive training that lay between her and operatic or concert or even music-hall stage. Her voice was fine at times. Again--most of the time--it was unreliable. No, she could not hope to get paying employment even as a church choir-singer. Miss Dresser who sang in the choir of the Good Shepherd for ten dollars a Sunday, had not nearly so good a voice as she, but it was reliable.

"There is nothing I can do--nothing!"

All at once, with no apparent bridge across the vast chasm, her heart went out, not in pity but in human understanding and sisterly sympathy, to the women of the pariah class at whom, during her stops in New York, she had sometimes gazed in wonder and horror. "Why, we and they are only a step apart," she said to herself in amazement. "We and they are much nearer than my maid or the cook and they!"

And then her heart skipped a beat and her skin grew cold and a fog swirled over her brain. If she should be cast out--if she could find no work and no one to support her--would she-- "O my God!" she moaned. "I must be crazy, to think such thoughts. I never could! I'd die first--DIE!" But if anyone had pictured to her the kind of life she was now leading--the humiliation and degradation she was meekly enduring with no thought of flight, with an ever stronger desire to stay on, regardless of pride and self-respect--if anyone had pictured this to her as what she would endure, what would she have said? She could see herself flashing scornful denial, saying that she would rather kill herself. Yet she was living--and was not even contemplating suicide as a way out!

A few days after Presbury gave her warning, her mother took advantage of his absence for his religiously observed daily constitutional to say to her:

"I hope you didn't think I was behind him in what he said to you about going away?"

Mildred had not thought so, but in her mother's guilty tone and guiltier eyes she now read that her mother wished her to go.

"It'd be awful for me to be left here alone with him," wailed her mother insincerely. "Of course we've got no money, and beggars can't be choosers. But it'd just about kill me to have you go."

Mildred could not speak.

"I don't know a thing about money," Mrs. Presbury went on. "Your father always looked after everything." She had fallen into the way of speaking of her first husband as part of some vague, remote past, which, indeed, he had become for her. "This man"--meaning Presbury--"has only about five thousand a year, as you know. I suppose that's as small as he says it is. I remember our bills for one month used to be as much or more than that." She waved her useless, pretty hands helplessly. "I don't see HOW we are to get on, Mildred!"