quality, but finding they made no progress in their
advances, presently desisted they were somewhat afraid
of her; as one of them remarked, “You always
knew she was there.” Miss Lottie Meyers,
who worked in the office of Mr. Orcutt, the superintendent
across the hall, experienced a brief infatuation that
turned to hate. She chewed gum incessantly, Janet
found her cheap perfume insupportable; Miss Meyers,
for her part, declared that Janet was “queer”
and “stuck up,” thought herself better
than the rest of them. Lottie Meyers was the
leader of a group of four or five which gathered in
the hallway at the end of the noon hour to enter animatedly
into a discussion of waists, hats, and lingerie, to
ogle and exchange persiflages with the young men of
the paymaster’s corps, to giggle, to relate,
sotto voce, certain stories that ended invariably in
hysterical laughter. Janet detested these conversations.
And the sex question, subtly suggested if not openly
dealt with, to her was a mystery over which she did
not dare to ponder, terrible, yet too sacred to be
degraded. Her feelings, concealed under an exterior
of self-possession, deceptive to the casual observer,
sometimes became molten, and she was frightened by
a passion that made her tremble—a passion
by no means always consciously identified with men,
embodying all the fierce unexpressed and unsatisfied
desires of her life.
These emotions, often suggested by some hint of beauty,
as of the sun glinting on the river on a bright blue
day, had a sudden way of possessing her, and the longing
they induced was pain. Longing for what?
For some unimagined existence where beauty dwelt, and
light, where the ecstasy induced by these was neither
moiled nor degraded; where shame, as now, might not
assail her. Why should she feel her body hot with
shame, her cheeks afire? At such moments she
would turn to the typewriter, her fingers striking
the keys with amazing rapidity, with extraordinary
accuracy and force,—force vaguely disturbing
to Mr. Claude Ditmar as he entered the office one
morning and involuntarily paused to watch her.
She was unaware of his gaze, but her colour was like
a crimson signal that flashed to him and was gone.
Why had he never noticed her before? All these
months, for more than a year, perhaps,—she
had been in his office, and he had not so much as
looked at her twice. The unguessed answer was
that he had never surprised her in a vivid moment.
He had a flair for women, though he had never encountered
any possessing the higher values, and it was characteristic
of the plane of his mental processes that this one
should remind him now of a dark, lithe panther, tensely
strung, capable of fierceness. The pain of having
her scratch him would be delectable.