As an office worker Minnie was not so successful as Mr. Petersen had anticipated. Not by any means. She tried; she was very earnest and, in a way, painstaking, but it was extremely difficult to teach her anything. Within a week Mr. Petersen was bitterly regretting Miss Layne, whom he had ruthlessly, although generously, discharged. He was obliged to admit that Minnie was not bright or quick, and neither was she accurate. She learned to typewrite, but how badly! At figures she was hopeless. She always made mistakes.
“But I know you’ll go over them,” she would say, in regard to her crooked and erroneous columns. “You’re sure to find any mistakes there are.”
He remembered Frances, her capability and intelligence. He asked after her.
“She’s gone out to the Coast,” Minnie told him. “She’s settled out there. I never hear from her.”
Evidently a serious breach. He regretted it; he thought what a help Frances might be to her poor sister.
Somehow it distressed him to see the poor plump little soul working away, poring over his books. He got Miss Layne back again, and she did all the work that really mattered, and left the rest for her abhorred colleague. She detested and despised and feared Minnie. She had seen at once that the artful widow was sure to hoodwink Mr. Petersen.
He saw strange things going on, which amused while they troubled him. He saw Minnie putting pencils and erasers and sheets and sheets of folded paper into her coat pocket. For her child, no doubt: but though he smiled at her maternal obsession, he was growing convinced that the womanly woman is out of place in a business office....
Her conduct toward Miss Layne he could not admire. She was so unnecessarily haughty, so frigid. And insisted so upon this being her first experience of “work.”
“Of course you’re used to it,” she would say, whenever she had made a glaring mistake, “but I’ve never been outside my own home before.”
She liked to bring her lunch with her, sandwiches and so on which the hotel put up for her—as well as fruit and cake which she purloined from the dinner table—and she made a great ceremony of spreading out a little embroidered doily on the desk, on which to lay her food.
“I do love to make things a little bit dainty and homelike,” she told Mr. Petersen. “You don’t mind, do you?”
But the doily was soon very far from dainty. Mr. Petersen thought he would not care to eat anything that had lain on it. He felt sorrier than ever for the poor little woman when he saw her sitting before it, so daintily eating thick ham sandwiches, and adding new bits of butter and strings of fat to her homelike tablecloth. In the course of time, the rats ate it, lace and all, and she had nothing daintier than several sheets of his best typewriting paper, fresh every day, on which to lay out her repast.
It began to dawn upon her before very long that she was not altogether indispensable; that Mr. Petersen and Miss Layne could manage the office very well without her. So she began entreating them to teach her, anything and everything. The books, especially. And, as she wrote a good enough hand, and apparently took great pains, Mr. Petersen allowed her to post certain items, providing she didn’t try to write in any of her own totals. She enjoyed doing this; she used to ask Mr. Petersen for “the books” as early in the morning as possible, because she liked to see him open the safe and hand these precious volumes to her.
But she was detected in an awful deed. He saw her, with his own eyes, carefully tearing out one of the numbered pages.
“Mrs. Naylor!” he cried. “What are you doing?”
She looked up, blushing crimson.
“I was going to copy it all again,” she explained pitifully. “I hadn’t written it very nicely. I didn’t have a proper pen. And I did take such pride in having it all look nice!”
The books went back to Miss Layne again, while Mr. Petersen invented tasks for Minnie.
She took her work with the utmost seriousness. One day Mr. Petersen surprised her wiping away a surreptitious tear.
“Now, then!” he said kindly, “What’s the matter?”
She tried to answer cheerfully, but her voice failed.
“Sandra doesn’t seem well,” she said, “I don’t know—her throat”
“But, my dear Mrs. Naylor, why didn’t you stay home? You mustn’t worry yourself like this!”
“I didn’t want to neglect my work,” she said.
And she meant it; she had, in Minnie-fashion, made herself believe that she was essential, that her absence would cause trouble. She had to believe this; her vanity would have suffered too cruelly otherwise.
Mr. Petersen assured her and reassured her, almost begged her to go home, even appealed to Miss Layne, who answered, in what a tone, that she thought she could manage alone.
So Minnie put on her poor little coat and hat and hurried off to Mr. Petersen’s house. She had never been in it before. Mrs. Hansen, the housekeeper, observed her coming up the front steps with deep misgivings. She knew her well by sight; had often seen her in the old days, driving by with her sister, and even then had been inordinately irritated.... The idea of Mr. Petersen, king of men, learned, just, endowed with every virtue, forever picking his choicest flowers and fruits for those “beggars,” as she called them! Living there all those years without paying him a penny, and then, if you please, walking off without so much as thank you! Ungrateful creatures, owing everyone, and turning up their noses at honest people ten times better than themselves. And this one was the worst of the lot.
However, with a manner absolutely correct, Mrs. Hansen opened the door, and even smiled.
“I am Mrs. Naylor,” said Minnie, pleasantly.
“I know who you are, and all about you!” thought Mrs. Hansen, though aloud she said, “Yes, ma’am.” Although her husband was a Socialist, and her revered Mr. Petersen as well, Mrs. Hansen had no patience with such ideas. She knew herself to be a housekeeper, and as a housekeeper, socially obliged to call this widow “ma’am.”
“I came for my little girl,” Minnie went on. “I felt worried about her this morning. She didn’t seem well.”
Mrs. Hansen had her private opinion about the cause of the child’s listlessness, which she had confided to her husband, but not, of course, to Mr. Petersen, whom she looked upon as already lost.
“The child’s up till all hours of the night,” she said to Hansen, “and eats all sorts of trash. What could you expect?”
“I think she’s better now,” she said to Minnie, “she’s taken two glasses of milk.”
“You do take such wonderful care of her,” Minnie returned; “she tells me at night of so many things you’ve done for her.”
“She’s a lovely, good child,” Mrs. Hansen answered, quite unmoved by the flattery.
She led Minnie through a narrow red-carpeted passage into her kitchen, pride and joy of her life, filled with sun and sweet air, utterly clean, gleaming and neat. From the window she pointed out the quiet baby, sitting on the back steps, leaning her head against a post, languid, thoughtful, quite contented. Beside her sat an immense cat.
“Why!” cried Minnie. “That—can it possibly be Michael?”
“Yes, ma’am, it’s your cat. Mr. Petersen took it after your sister left.”
Minnie looked down with tears in her eyes at her long-lost darling, sleek and fat still, but old; his buccaneer swagger gone, his insolent eyes dim. She touched his head, with the furry skin so tightly drawn over the round little skull; but he never stirred. He didn’t know her, didn’t care for her.
Then she took Sandra by the hand and led her off, out of the fresh air and the quiet garden, back to the hotel, where she got her into bed in their hot little room and read to her, hovered over her, flooded her with sympathy.
“You just needed Mother, didn’t you, baby?” she said. “Mother knows what her little girl wants!”