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Page 34
With the tread of a red Indian, he approached the door and put
his ear to it. He found he could hear quite comfortably.
Aline, meantime, inside the room, had begun to draw comfort from
Joan's very appearance, she looked so capable.
Joan's eyes had changed the expression they had contained during
the recent interview. They were soft now, with a softness that
was half compassionate, half contemptuous. It is the compensation
which life gives to those whom it has handled roughly in order
that they shall be able to regard with a certain contempt the
small troubles of the sheltered. Joan remembered Aline of old,
and knew her for a perennial victim of small troubles. Even in
their schooldays she had always needed to be looked after and
comforted. Her sweet temper had seemed to invite the minor slings
and arrows of fortune. Aline was a girl who inspired
protectiveness in a certain type of her fellow human beings. It
was this quality in her that kept George Emerson awake at nights;
and it appealed to Joan now.
Joan, for whom life was a constant struggle to keep the wolf
within a reasonable distance from the door, and who counted that
day happy on which she saw her way clear to paying her weekly
rent and possibly having a trifle over for some coveted hat or
pair of shoes, could not help feeling, as she looked at Aline,
that her own troubles were as nothing, and that the immediate
need of the moment was to pet and comfort her friend. Her
knowledge of Aline told her the probable tragedy was that she had
lost a brooch or had been spoken to crossly by somebody; but it
also told her that such tragedies bulked very large on Aline's
horizon.
Trouble, after all, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder;
and Aline was far less able to endure with fortitude the loss of
a brooch than she herself to bear the loss of a position the
emoluments of which meant the difference between having just
enough to eat and starving.
"You're worried about something," she said. "Sit down and tell me
all about it."
Aline sat down and looked about her at the shabby room. By that
curious process of the human mind which makes the spectacle of
another's misfortune a palliative for one's own, she was feeling
oddly comforted already. Her thoughts were not definite and she
could not analyze them; but what they amounted to was that,
though it was an unpleasant thing to be bullied by a dyspeptic
father, the world manifestly held worse tribulations, which her
father's other outstanding quality, besides dyspepsia--wealth, to
wit--enabled her to avoid.
It was at this point that the dim beginnings of philosophy began
to invade her mind. The thing resolved itself almost into an
equation. If father had not had indigestion he would not have
bullied her. But, if father had not made a fortune he would not
have had indigestion. Therefore, if father had not made a fortune
he would not have bullied her. Practically, in fact, if father
did not bully her he would not be rich. And if he were not rich--
She took in the faded carpet, the stained wall paper and the
soiled curtains with a comprehensive glance. It certainly cut
both ways. She began to be a little ashamed of her misery.
"It's nothing at all; really," she said. "I think I've been
making rather a fuss about very little."
Joan was relieved. The struggling life breeds moods of
depression, and such a mood had come to her just before Aline's
arrival. Life, at that moment, had seemed to stretch before her
like a dusty, weary road, without hope. She was sick of fighting.
She wanted money and ease, and a surcease from this perpetual
race with the weekly bills. The mood had been the outcome partly
of R. Jones' gentlemanly-veiled insinuations, but still more,
though she did not realize it, of her yesterday's meeting with
Aline.
Mr. Peters might be unguarded in his speech when conversing with
his daughter--he might play the tyrant toward her in many ways;
but he did not stint her in the matter of dress allowance, and,
on the occasion when she met Joan, Aline had been wearing so
Parisian a hat and a tailor-made suit of such obviously expensive
simplicity that green-eyed envy had almost spoiled Joan's
pleasure at meeting this friend of her opulent days.
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