The Grain of Dust. David Graham Phillips

different from any he had seen before. The others had all been women—womanly women, full of the weakness, the delicateness rather, that distinguishes the feminine. This woman he was looking at now had a look of strength. He had thought her frail. He was seeing a strong woman—a splendidly healthy body, with sinews of steel most gracefully covered by that fair smooth skin of hers. And her features, too—why, this girl was a person of character, of will.

      He glanced through the pages. "All right—thank you," he said hastily. "Please don't stay any longer. Leave the other thing till to-morrow."

      "No—it has to be done to-night."

      "But I insist upon your going."

      She hesitated, said quietly, "Very well," and turned to go.

      "And you mustn't do it at home, either."

      She made no reply, but waited respectfully until it was evident he wished to say no more, then went out. He bundled together his papers, sealed and stamped and addressed his letter, put on his overcoat and hat and crossed the outer office on his way to the door. It was empty; she was gone. He descended in the elevator to the street, remembered that he had not locked one of his private cases, returned. As he opened the outer door he heard the sound of typewriter keys. In the corner, the obscure, sheltered corner, sat the girl, bent with childlike gravity over her typewriter. It was an amusing and a touching sight—she looked so young and so solemnly in earnest.

      "Didn't I tell you to go home?" he called out, with mock sternness.

      Up she sprang, her hand upon her heart. And once more she was beautiful, but once more it was in a way startlingly, unbelievably different from any expression he had seen before.

      "Now, really. Miss—" He had forgotten her name. "You must not stay on here. We aren't such slave drivers as all that. Go home, please. I'll take the responsibility."

      She had recovered her equanimity. In her quiet, gentle voice—but it no longer sounded weak or insignificant—she said, "You are very kind, Mr. Norman. But I must finish my work."

      "Haven't I said I'd take the blame?"

      "But you can't," replied she. "I work badly. I seem to learn slowly. If I fall behind, I shall lose my place—sooner or later. It was that way with the last place I had. If you interfered, you'd only injure me. I've had experience. And—I must not lose my place."

      One of the scrub women thrust her mussy head and ragged, shapeless body in at the door. With a start Norman awoke to the absurdity of his situation—and to the fact that he was placing the girl in a compromising position. He shrugged his shoulders, went in and locked the cabinet, departed.

      "What a queer little insignificance she is!" thought he, and dismissed her from mind.

II

       Table of Contents

      Many and fantastic are the illusions the human animal, in its ignorance and its optimism, devises to change life from a pleasant journey along a plain road into a fumbling and stumbling and struggling about in a fog. Of these hallucinations the most grotesque is that the weak can come together, can pass a law to curb the strong, can set one of their number to enforce it, may then disperse with no occasion further to trouble about the strong. Every line of every page of history tells how the strong—the nimble-witted, the farsighted, the ambitious—have worked their will upon their feebler and less purposeful fellow men, regardless of any and all precautions to the contrary. Conditions have improved only because the number of the strong has increased. With so many lions at war with each other not a few rabbits contrive to avoid perishing in the nest.

      Norman's genius lay in ability to take away from an adversary the legal weapons implicitly relied upon and to arm his client with them. No man understood better than he the abysmal distinction between law and justice; no man knew better than he how to compel—or to assist—courts to apply the law, so just in the general, to promoting injustice in the particular. And whenever he permitted conscience a voice in his internal debates—it was not often—he heard from it its usual servile approbation: How can the reign of justice be more speedily brought about than by making the reign of law—lawyer law—intolerable?

      About a fortnight after the trifling incident related in the previous chapter, Norman had to devise a secret agreement among several of the most eminent of his clients. They wished to band together, to do a thing expressly forbidden by the law; they wished to conspire to lower wages and raise prices in several railway systems under their control. But none would trust the others; so there must be something in writing, laid away in a secret safety deposit box along with sundry bundles of securities put up as forfeit, all in the custody of Norman. When he had worked out in his mind and in fragmentary notes the details of their agreement, he was ready for some one to do the clerical work. The some one must be absolutely trustworthy, as the plain language of the agreement would make clear to the dullest mind dazzling opportunities for profit—not only in stock jobbing but also in blackmail. He rang for Tetlow, the head clerk. Tetlow—smooth and sly and smug, lacking only courageous initiative to make him a great lawyer, but, lacking that, lacking all—Tetlow entered and closed the door behind him.

      Norman leaned back in his desk chair and laced his fingers behind his head. "One of your typewriters is a slight blonde girl—sits in the corner to the far left—if she's still here."

      "Miss Hallowell," said Tetlow. "We are letting her go at the end of this week. She's nice and ladylike, and willing—in fact, most anxious to please. But the work's too difficult for her. She's rather—rather—well, not exactly stupid, but slow."

      "Um," said Norman reflectively. "There's Miss Bostwick—perhaps she'll do."

      "Miss Bostwick got married last week."

      Norman smiled. He remembered the girl because she was the oldest and homeliest in the office. "There's somebody for everybody—eh, Tetlow?"

      "He was a lighthouse keeper," said Tetlow. "There's a story that he advertised for a wife. But that may be a joke."

      "Why not that Miss—Miss Halloway?" mused Norman.

      "Miss Hallowell," corrected Tetlow.

      "Hallowell—yes. Is she—very incompetent?

      "Not exactly that. But business is slackening—and she's been only temporary—and——"

      Norman cut him off with, "Send her in."

      "You don't wish her dismissed? I haven't told her yet."

      "Oh, I'm not interfering in your department. Do as you like. … No—in this case—let her stay on for the present."

      "I can use her," said Tetlow. "And she gets only ten a week."

      Norman frowned. He did not like to hear that an establishment in which he had control paid less than decent living wages—even if the market price did excuse—yes, compel it. "Send her in," he repeated. Then, as Tetlow was about to leave, "She is trustworthy?"

      "All our force is. I see to that, Mr. Norman."

      "Has she a young man—steady company, I think they call it?"

      "She has no friends at all. She's extremely shy—at least, reserved. Lives with her father, an old crank of an analytical chemist over in Jersey City. She hasn't even a lady friend."

      "Well, send her in."

      A moment later Norman, looking up from his work, saw the dim slim nonentity before him. Again he leaned back and, as he talked with her, studied her face to make sure that his first judgment was correct. "Do you stay late every night?" asked he smilingly.

      She colored a little, but enough to bring out the exquisite fineness of her white skin. "Oh, I don't mind," said she, and there was no embarrassment in her manner. "I've got to learn—and doing things over helps."