Читать книгу Bread - Charles G. Norris - Страница 15

The morning was gone before she knew it. She went out at lunch-time, walked a few blocks up Fourth Avenue and then turned back to the office. She did not eat; she did not want any lunch; her mind was absorbed in her work; she had hardly left the building before she wanted to get back to her desk, to recopy a letter or two in which she had made some erasures. The afternoon fled like the morning.

A whirl of confused impressions spun about in her brain as she shut her eyes and tried to go to sleep that night. Although she ached with fatigue, she was too excited to lose consciousness at once. The day’s events, like a merry-go-round, wheeled around and around her. On the whole she was satisfied. She had finished all of the letters Mr. Beardsley had given her; he had beckoned her to come to him after he had read them, had commended her, and given her back but one to correct in which the punctuation was faulty.

“I’m sure you’ll do all right, Miss Sturgis,” he told her. “You’ll find it much easier as soon as you get used to the work.”

And Jeannette felt she had made a real friend in Miss Alexander, the girl across the aisle who had so generously, so wonderfully helped her. Among the riff-raff of girls that surged in and out of the office, cheaply dressed, loud-laughing, common little chits, Beatrice Alexander was easily recognizable as belonging to Jeannette’s own class. Each had discerned in the other a similarity of thought, of taste and refinement that drew them immediately together.

A wonderful, tremendous feeling of importance and self-respect came to Jeannette as she had made her way across crowded Twenty-third Street and encountered a great tide of other workers homeward bound; as she climbed the steep elevated station steps, and with the pushing, jostling crowd wedged her way on board a train; as she hung to a strap in the swaying car and squeezed herself through the jam of people about the doorway when Ninety-third Street was reached, and as she walked the brief block and a half that remained before she was at last at home. Every instant of the way she hugged the soul-satisfying thought that she had proven herself; now she was truly a full-fledged wage-earner, a working girl. She had achieved, she felt, economic value.