The Real Adventure
not what one would call a good-natured face. But good-natured
sentimentality was the last thing Rose was looking for.
"What can I do for you?" she asked. Her voice was as tight and brisk as
the rest of her.
"I'm looking for a job," said Rose.
Miss Gibbons came a step closer and her bright look pierced a little
more deeply.
"So!" she said. "You're the actress, are you?"
Rose smiled at that. "I'm not a real actress," she said, "but I'm who
you mean. I was a chorus-girl with that company that broke down here."
"Why didn't you go away when the rest of them did?" the milliner
demanded.
"I decided I didn't want to go on being a chorus-girl," said Rose, "and
I thought there was as good a chance of getting other work here as in
Chicago."
"That was a sort of fool idea, I guess, wasn't it?" Miss Gibbons
suggested.
"It seems so, up to now," said Rose. "I spent the morning on Main Street
without having any luck. I went to five places ..."
"Five?" questioned Miss Gibbons. "I knew about Arthur Perkins and Sim
Laidlaw and Tabby Parkes. Who were the other two?"
Rose couldn't enlighten her. She'd forgotten their names.
"I've had work offered to me," she went on, "or at least suggested. Mr.
Culver at the hotel told me of a moving-picture place ..."
"Where you could sit in that glass cage of Al Zeider's and sell
tickets?" Miss Gibbons broke in. "Why didn't you take it?"
"I told Mr. Culver," said Rose, "that I'd already walked the length of
Main Street and back, and that was enough for me."
"How did John Culver happen to say anything about that? How come it you
were talking to him?"
"I'd asked him to hire me as a waitress," said Rose.
"And I reckon," said Miss Gibbons, "that he told you he kept a
respectable hotel. He may have put some frills on it, but that's close
enough to go on, isn't it?"
Rose nodded. In her relief at finding her situation so well understood,
she was turning a little limp.
"Why did you come to me?" Miss Gibbons demanded. "He never would have
thought of sending you here."
Rose braced up once more and told about her conversation with Judge
Granger.
This time the milliner heard her through.
"And so the judge sent you to me," she said, when Rose had finished. "I
suppose that was his fool idea of being funny. He thought it was a
chance to get me poison mad."
Rose nodded a little wearily.
"Yes," she said, "I suppose that was it."
The milliner shot out a sharp glance at her. "Sit down," she said
bruskly, and nodded to a chair.
Rose didn't much want to. Her instinct was to stay on her feet until
she'd won her battle, and her fatigue only heightened it. But Miss
Gibbons had given her an order rather than an invitation, and she obeyed
it.
The older woman didn't sit down.
"Harvey Granger," she said thoughtfully, "will never forgive me as long
as he lives, for not thinking he's a great man. That's just ridiculous,
of course, because I know Harve. Years ago, you see,--so long ago that
everybody's forgotten it--my father was the big man down in this part of
the state. He was a circuit judge, when circuit judges amounted to
something, and he was one of the best of them. But he was a fool about
money and he got mixed up in things--and died. I was twenty-five years
old then, and I took to hats.
"Well, Harve Granger was my father's law-clerk before father was elected
judge. I used to see him night and morning. And, as I say, I know him
all the way through. He knows I know him, and that's what he can't get
over."
There was a little silence when she finished; a silence Rose's instinct
told her not to break. Presently the little woman wheeled around on her.
"Well," she said, "you came to me anyway, though you saw the judge
meant it for a joke. Why did you do that?"
"I don't know," said Rose. "I thought I would."
"And you haven't told me yet," said Miss Gibbons, "that you're really
straight and respectable. What have you got to say about that?"
"Nothing much," said Rose. "I am straight and respectable. But I suppose
a woman who wasn't would pretend to be. So you will have to decide about
that for yourself."
"Hmph!" grunted Miss Gibbons. "I don't know why I asked a fool question
like that, unless it's because, like the rest of them, I live in
Centropolis. I know what you are, as well as you do yourself."
The words were brusk, and the inflection of them not much gentler, but
they fell on Rose's heart like rain; like an unexpected warm little
shower out of a brazen sky. She caught her breath, and, to her
consternation, felt her eyes flushing up with tears. She hadn't realized
the tension she had been under, until it was relaxed. She gave a shaky
half-suppressed sob and then made a desperate effort to pull herself
together.
"Now, look here!" said Miss Gibbons, in a tone harder and dryer than
ever. "I'm not going to take you in and pay you wages just because
you're a cat in a strange garret and don't know where to turn. I'm not
even going to do it to spite Harve Granger. But, if you've got any sort
of gumption about hats, I am going to do it, and the rest of this fool
town can say what it likes and do what it pleases. So the thing for you
to do is to quiet down sensibly and show me whether you can trim a hat."
It took Rose a few minutes to carry out the first part of this
injunction. The rush of relief and gratitude and happiness shook her.
Given _carte blanche_ to design a special angel from Heaven to come down
and give her just the comfort and encouragement she wanted, she couldn't
have imagined one so good as Miss Gibbons,--with those keen
straight-looking eyes that had observed her fellow citizens of
Centropolis for the last half-century or so, not in vain; with her
courageous common sense, and with that dry, cool, astringent manner,
which lay with a pleasant healing sting on the lacerations of Rose's
soul.
For a while she just sat still and tried to get the catch out of her
breathing. At last, when she thought she could trust her voice not to
break absurdly, she smiled and said:
"What sort of hat do you want me to trim? I mean, for what sort of
person?"
"What sort of person!" echoed Miss Gibbons and gave Rose a rather keen
look. "Why," she said, after hesitating a moment, "there's a silly old
maid in this town. She ain't more than ten years younger than I am, but
her hair's stayed sort of fluffy and yellow, and she's kept part of her
looks, though not near as much of them as she thinks. She was a
beautiful girl at twenty, I'll say that for her. None of these girls now
compares with her. But she was a little too sure of herself and took too
long deciding among the young men of this town, until all at once, she
found that nobody wanted her. She's been trying ever since to show she
doesn't care; and she pesters the life out of me twice a year trying to
fit her out with a hat. I won't let her go around the streets looking
like a giddy young fool, and that's what she's determined to do. So, if
you can suit her _and_ me, you will be doing pretty well."
The description made a picture for Rose. She saw the faded pathetic
prettiness of the woman who'd looked too long and had been trying to
pretend for the last fifteen years or so that she didn't care. And the
picture in her mind's eye was surmounted by a hat; a hat that conceded
some of the years Miss Gibbons had insisted on, and that her client was
unwilling to acknowledge, and yet retained a sort of jauntiness.
She didn't know whether she could execute the thing she saw or not, out
of the stock of materials at her disposal. But it hadn't cost her a
thought or an effort to see the hat.
"All right," she said after a bit. "I'll see what I can do. If you'll
show me where the things are ..."
It was a much humbler sort of job, of course, designing a hat for a
middle-aged village spinster, than making those dozen gowns for
Goldsmith and Block had been. But this consideration never occurred to
her. She found, and was not even amazed to find, the same thrill of
exhilaration in conquering the small problem, that she had found in the
larger one. She worked with the same swift unconscious economy of labor
and materials.
At the end of two hours, she presented the result of her labors for the
milliner's approval.
Miss Gibbons surveyed it with a smile of ironic appreciation.
"It isn't what I'd call a real finished job," she commented after a
minute inspection of some of the details of Rose's sewing. "I wouldn't
trust it in a high wind not to scatter all the way from here to the
Presbyterian church. But it will certainly suit Agatha Stebbins."
She looked at it a while longer. "And I don't know," she concluded a
little reluctantly, "as it'll look so all-mighty foolish on her, either.
Will ten dollars a week suit you to begin on?"
"Yes," said Rose, "that will suit me very well indeed."
"All right," said Miss Gibbons. "That's settled. There's one more thing
to settle now, and that's where you're going to live."
Rose contemplated this question a little blankly for a moment.
"Do you suppose," she said, "there's any place in this town where I
_can_ live; where they'd take a person like me? Or would it be all
right, if you asked them?"
"Oh, I guess," said Miss Gibbons, "we could most likely find somebody.
I'll think about it."
She gave Rose some work to do and didn't refer to the matter again till
nearly six o'clock.
"I've been thinking," she said then, "that I've got room for a boarder
myself. There's a little room back here that I don't use; there's a
black girl does me out and cooks my dinner and supper, and I get my own
breakfast. The girl could cook for two as well as one, and I guess I
could feed you for two dollars a week. If that ain't satisfactory, you
can just say so."
"Satisfactory!" said Rose, and once more her voice broke.
"All right," said Miss Gibbons hastily, "we'll say no more about it.
That's settled. I'll send the girl to the hotel to get your bags."
John Galbraith's letter asking Rose to report to him July first in New
York, reached her via Portia, during the last week in June, and made an
abrupt conclusion to her life at Centropolis.
Those weeks with Miss Gibbons in the millinery parlor, when she looked
back on them afterward, set in as they were between that purgatorial
winter and the first breathless months while she was establishing
herself in New York, had a quality of happiness and peace, which she was
wont to describe as heavenly.
She'd probably have taken to Miss Gibbons in any circumstance. But,
coming into her life just when she did, the little woman was the shadow
of a great rock to her. She was in a state, when she settled down in the
milliner's spare back room over the drug-store, where all the warmer
emotions seemed terrible to her. It was Rodney's love for her and hers
for him, that had bruised and lacerated her; that had made the winter
months a long torment, unmitigated during the last of them, by any form
of adequate self-expression. The two parodies on love which had been
thrust into her face just at the end, Olga Larson's inverted form of it
toward herself, and Dolly's shabby little romance, had given her an
absolute loathing for it. To her, in that condition, any expression of
friendship that was warm and soft, and in the least sentimental, would
have been almost unendurable to her. Miss Gibbons, in that acrid
antiseptic way of hers, simply washed her soul in cold water and clothed
it again in the garments of self-respect.
Her manner to Rose, even as their friendship ripened and grew more
confident, never changed. Nor did the manner Rose adopted toward her.
Their endless talks resulted in a good deal of self-revelation, but this
was never direct. Miss Gibbons never again came as near to a