When her hopes came true and she enlarged her quarters and took a third assistant and opened a checking account, and alternated Saturdays off with L. Frankland; when her hopes came true they weren't hopes any more, but history. For anyone with the gambler's instinct, and Georgia had more than a little of it, yesterday is a dull affair compared with to-morrow.
It gives one a mighty respectable feeling to have the receiving teller smile and say, "What--you--again?" when you come to his window. Then he writes a new total in your book in purple ink and you peek at it once or twice on your way back to the office.
Yes, success was very sweet and creditable. It did away with a heap of worry around the first of the month; any woman is happier for not having to make last year's suit do; and people are certainly more polite. Money's the oil of life. But it isn't life.
If you're only thirty, and the dollar's all you want, or get--Georgia leaned back in her pivot chair and stretched her arms above her head and yawned, ho-ho-hum, the stodgy man will get you if you don't watch out.
"Frank," she asked, "do you ever feel like an automaton that's been wound up and has to keep going till it runs down!"
"But what's the use? what's the answer?" continued Georgia querulously.
L. Frankland looked over her spectacles and her shoulder, her hands still on the keyboard. "The answer," she said vivaciously, "for a woman is a man; for a man the answer is a woman. Whoever made us knew what he was about, and don't you forget it. What's your idea?"
"Once when I was a young thing," said L. Frankland, swinging around, "I waited for an hour in my wedding dress, but--he never came. He was killed on the way to the church by a runaway horse. I decided to remain true to his memory. I had other chances afterwards, when I was still a young thing," she smiled whimsically, "but I refused them. I'm sorry now."
"Frank, you remember my telling you about that money I owed to the man I--spoke about?"
"Well, I paid it off last week, and I've been miserable ever since."
"That's because you felt you were snapping the last thread. Is he still in love with you?"
"No. At least I don't see how he could be. It's been so long, and the last time he saw me," Georgia laughed unhappily, "I wasn't very lovely."