CHAPTER III.

For two days following that bright morning in September, the skies dropped discouragement on all enthusiasms, and dampened any ardor for aggressive change. What feminine heart has the courage to go forth gloriously to conquer or to die—in overshoes and a gossamer?

In the meantime, the girls had not met again, but new thoughts sprouted in their brains, while feeble plans budded and dropped unfruitful from the bough.

Nan lighted a fire in the grate in her room, and re-read and burned package upon package of old letters, tossing away with special vigor all those tied with that badge of sentimental girlhood—a blue ribbon. Why always blue?

“There!” she exclaimed, as the last mouse-colored fragment fluttered up the chimney; “there is nothing like beginning again at the foundation, in every way.”

This heroic sacrifice completed, she sewed on some loose shoe-buttons with as much vigor as though she contemplated setting out on foot to seek her fortune. After that, she pressed her forehead against the window-pane, and wished drearily that it would stop raining.

Evelyn, after an hour’s interview with her mother, began to rip up an old dress, though she was evidently busied also with serious thoughts.

Cathy, left to herself, and without the stimulating influence of her friends, decided with placid regret that there was no way to improve her existence; she felt like the man who tried to lift himself over the fence by pulling at his boot-straps.

Bert shut herself up and wrestled with a long column of very symmetrical figures. The result of the addition seemed to dismay her. She clutched her bang with one hand, while she carefully went over the list again.

Bert had lain awake hours and hours the night before, rehearsing the various parts she might assume as a lady-like peddler of different wares to a paying public; but she surveyed her small pack of accomplishments with the sad conviction that she “hadn’t a faculty that anybody would give two cents for.” “If some one would kindly hire me to read all the new novels, or should desire my services as assistant hostess at endless dinners and luncheons, I think I might command quite a salary,” sighed she, knowing well her own self-poise and general success in those unremunerative employments.

“Or, there is my other little stock-in-trade,” she continued with disconsolate amusement—“writing letters! I do think I can write a letter.”

And she could, because she always wrote with the keen mental enjoyment of exercising her own fluent powers of expression. “But,” she reflected, “who is going to pay my dress-maker for the intense pleasure of being allowed to receive my epistles? No, letter-writing hasn’t any market value—But—but _hasn’t_ it?”

Ah, now she was really thinking! For she sat motionless, with raised eyebrows and parted lips; then she started to her feet, walked excitedly up and down her room a few times, surveyed herself in the glass, and laughed and chuckled in a mysterious way as she put on her overshoes and hoisted her umbrella.

Mr. Mitchell was a very busy man—too busy to know his daughter very well; and, as is far too common with busy men, he regarded a girl as an entirely useless, rather expensive but withal pleasant factor of his establishment. So, as may be imagined, he was somewhat surprised as he sat in his private office on that particular drizzly day, hurriedly writing a business letter, when Bert, bright and emphatic, suddenly appeared.

Her father, without stopping his rapid pen, looked up, between sentences, long enough to say with good-natured bewilderment, “Why, Bert, what has brought you _here_? Do you need some more money?”

Bert flushed at that question. Some thoughts with which she had been exercising her mind had made it a trifle sore; and in the mood occasioned by those thoughts, her father’s evident surprise at her appearance, his slight emphasis on “here,” and his seemingly natural conclusion as to the cause of the phenomenon, rather hurt her feelings.

“Money?” she said, with some heat, “No, sir! Do you regard me as only a creature with an all-devouring greed for gold?”

Then, laughing pleasantly as she deposited her umbrella in the rack, she added, “No, Papa dear, not _just_ now. I thought you would be going home soon and I’d like to walk up with you.”

Mr. Mitchell paused a moment, in the act of clapping on another stamp, to survey his tall daughter through his eye-glasses.

“Eh! That’s good. I can’t go for half an hour though—six or seven more letters to write.”

He said this a little wearily, and proceeded to date another sheet of paper, running his left hand through his thin hair, as though he had already forgotten his daughter’s presence in the absorbing nature of his relations with “Messrs. Hutton, Wells & Co.”

Bert sat down in an office chair and looked about her. Not that she had never been in her father’s office before, but never before had she looked at it with the same mental vision that now surveyed the dingy windows, dusty writing-desk, and generally unkempt and dismal aspect of the place where her father spent so much of his life.

[Illustration: BERT AND HER FATHER HAVE A BUSINESS INTERVIEW.]

“Dear me,” she thought, “how soon I could brighten up things! I wonder if he would like it if I should try?”

Presently Mr. Mitchell collected a heap of letters, shut up his inkstand, and wheeled his chair slowly about, as he carefully counted them over.

Bert, who had been contemplating in her mind’s eye the effect of a rug on the floor, looked up and remarked, “What a lot of letters!”

“Yes,” answered her father with a sigh, “since Nelson went I have had my hands full. It is hard to fill his place.”

“Why?” asked Bert, with interest.

“Because,” said Mr. Mitchell slowly, “good stenographers do not grow on every bush; and it is difficult to find any one to whom I can intrust my private correspondence.”

He took his coat from the hook and slowly put it on his shoulders, while Bert sat still, looking very lugubrious.

“Oh,” she said slowly, “would your amanuensis have to know short-hand?”

“Of course,” her father replied, looking somewhat surprised at the unusual interest in such affairs exhibited by his brilliant daughter, of whom he had perhaps been rather more proud than fond.

“You see,” he continued, “I might as well write them myself as wait for him to write out my dictation in long hand.”

Mr. Mitchell stepped into the general office to give a direction to one of the many clerks, all of whom were getting their hats with great promptness as the minute-hand neared six.

Bert sat looking thoughtfully at a fantastic cobweb in the corner.

When her father returned and asked her if she were ready to start, she still did not offer to stir; but, planting her umbrella firmly on the floor, she said in a very serious voice, but with a gleam in her eyes:

“Sir, I called strictly on business. Hearing that your confidential clerk had gone South because of weak lungs, I came to apply—pray take a seat, sir; you seem about to faint—to apply for the place.”

Mr. Mitchell sat down.

“To be frank, sir, I must own that I am not _thoroughly_ conversant with short-hand, but I should immediately go to work to perfect my knowledge, and in the meantime I should endeavor to be of valuable assistance to you.”

By this time, the senior member of the firm looked so helplessly confused that Bert began to laugh, breaking down utterly in her commercial tone of voice. Then she added in a rush of words, as she made a dash at her father and clasped her hands behind his neck: “Oh, _do_ let me, Papa!—I’d be _very_ confidential, and I’m just wild to earn some money!”

At this last remark, the astounded man probably would have gasped, had not his daughter prevented such an expression by a kiss.

“You poor dazed man!” she laughed. “Now please sit down, and it will take me just two minutes to explain my strange conduct; you will accept me as your helper in one second more; and then I shall commit my first act of indiscretion as your clerk, by walking home arm-in-arm with my employer.”

By this time Mr. Mitchell had risen equal to the joke, as he still considered the entire comedy, and demanded references as to her epistolary ability. Bert at once deafened him with an avalanche of names; but she immediately grew serious again, and began to explain frankly her new thoughts and desires.

Of course she was met by the usual discouragements with which the masculine mind teems, but she silenced them all by an earnest request for the privilege of a trial, like any other applicant for a clerkship.

At last, after much talking and earnest arguments, it was finally settled as they walked home under one umbrella, with a strange new sense of comradeship, that Bert should present herself at her father’s office next morning in time for the opening of the mail.