She thought of him through the next day as she sat at the switchboard, yawning and wishing the buzzers would sound often enough to keep her awake. She had decided the first week that this job was far too monotonous, but there seemed to be no alternative. At least it was better than the piano lessons, which she had given up after a brief month’s trial. That had been late in November, and for a few weeks thereafter, until the time came for her and Cecelia to go home for Christmas, she had done nothing but loaf. At home she had not mentioned the abandonment of the lessons, and Cecelia had been sworn to secrecy. Returning to Chicago the third day of the new year, and letting it be known through Cecelia and Mrs. Ranley that she was seeking an occupation, she had been invited by Mr. Graham — timidly, by way of Mrs. Ranley again — to join the staff of the most sanitary candy factory east of the Mississippi. When she found that joining the staff, translated into concrete and specific terms, meant sitting on a stool nine hours a day connecting Mr. Warton with Miss Goff, or getting Michigan 3208 extension 41 for Mr. Graham, she felt mildly that she had been cheated; but after all she was only nineteen, totally without training or experience, and it was a clean agreeable quiet place to work, if only Miss Goff would quit sneezing her glasses off her thin sharp nose.
Each week, promptly on Tuesday morning, she received a check from her father, and each time she removed it from the envelope she felt guilty and uneasy; this was her first major deception. But she could not bring herself to tell him that the piano lessons were no more — not that she was afraid of him exactly, she had pretty well shown that she had a mind of her own — it was merely that she felt it undesirable and impolitic to reopen a painful question. Thus it was impossible to inform him that the remittance need no longer include the sum required for Mr. Burchellini’s fee; so each week after the check was cashed she carefully put away a twenty-dollar bill at the bottom of the drawer where she kept her handkerchiefs and stockings. Some day she could return it to him; that would be a pleasant surprise, she thought, and nothing to turn up his nose at, either; it was amazing how fast it piled up.
Joining the staff at the candy factory had somewhat disarranged the domestic scene. Whereas Lora now had to arise at seven and therefore needed to be in bed by ten-thirty or eleven, Cecelia did not have to appear at the School of Design before noon and could stay in bed till eleven if she wanted to. This had its drawbacks; they could no longer have pleasant leisurely breakfasts together by the sunny south window, talking over new acquaintances, mimicking Mrs. Ranley, recalling personalities and episodes and scandals from home, laughing at nothing and at each other. Lora missed this; so did Cecelia, who declared it was idiotic for Lora to waste her time sitting at a silly switchboard, actually getting up at seven o’clock six days a week for that; if she was really convinced she couldn’t do the piano — though for her part Cecelia thought she played very well indeed, take the Melody in F, for instance — she should try design, or modelling perhaps, if not sculpture then at least pottery — something worthwhile and creative. Unquestionably Lora had talent, she said — look at the decorations she had made for the high school pageant — everyone had been charmed by them. Which reminded her, why not try the stage? That was interesting and exciting and offered splendid opportunities for self-expression; she would like to take a go at it herself if she weren’t so buried in her career as an artist. Not that actresses weren’t artists too in a way...
Lora smiled and said nothing; her disagreement with this analysis was expressed only tacitly, in action. There were other disagreements — as to whether both windows should be left open on winter nights, for example — in which she was more vocal; but that and all others were friendly and without acrimony. The first that really produced heat was started by Cecelia’s objections to Pete Halliday.
She was as tolerant as the next one, she asserted, but Pete Halliday was a little too much. She didn’t know what Stubby Mallinson could have been thinking of to take him to the Ranleys’. All the boys agreed, even Stubby, that he was the most notorious character at the university; the only reason he hadn’t been kicked out was that he was so clever they couldn’t prove anything on him. It appeared that he would now be permitted to remain until June and get his diploma, that was true; it was also true that in the classes he condescended to attend he was insufferably brilliant; but he was a liar and a thief and a sneak. He was suspected on good grounds of things like stealing overcoats and selling them, things too petty and disgusting to talk about. When some of the boys made certain arrangements regarding examination questions he squealed on them. He exhibited a compromising letter which he had received from the wife of one of the professors, and then left it where the professor was sure to find it. Proof? No, he always arranged it so there should be no proof. He stole an automobile which belonged to one of the students and ran it off a pier into Lake Michigan...
“I know,” said Lora, “he told me about it. He said the student said all poetry should have a moral purpose. Anyway he said it didn’t do any good because he found out later that the insurance company paid for it.”
“Why shouldn’t poetry have a moral purpose?”
“I don’t know, I never read poetry. Neither do you.”
“I might. That doesn’t help matters anyhow. You know very well he’s not a decent person. You’re just being contrary; you’re just doing this out of spite.”
“I don’t see that it spites anyone.”
“All right; you’ll be sorry.”
It was around midnight, and they were getting ready for bed. Pete Halliday had left only ten minutes before; it had been his third or fourth visit; Cecelia had returned from the theatre just before his departure. She sat now on the edge of the bed massaging her scalp with her fingers, with her blond bobbed hair flying first this way then that; all of her fair white body was exposed save where the flimsy silk underwear, the straps slipped from the shoulders, had fallen about her middle; one stocking was off and the other was in loose folds about the knee. Lora, in a long yellow nightgown, to her ankles, her feet bare, with a toothbrush in her hand headed for the bathroom, stopped to fasten her regard on her friend with her eyebrows down.
“Look here, Cece,” she said, “you can be nasty about Pete if you want to. Your dumb friends, too. You might as well shut up.”
“If it’s a question of being dumb—” the other began; but Lora had gone into the bathroom, so she raised her voice: “What do you mean my dumb friends? They’re yours as much as mine.”
There was no answer save the sound of the running faucet and the swish of the toothbrush. Cecelia hauled off the other stocking with a tug and threw it at a chair.
That was the beginning of April, and Lora had entered upon a new experience. She had sat at a restaurant table and seen Pete Halliday’s hand resting on the cloth before her, within reach; and later, alone in her room, had shivered with pleasure at the thought of that hand touching her. She did not like the feeling and assuredly did not invite it, but try as she might to replace it with more comfortable reflections, such as the birthday present soon to be sent to her mother or Grace Ranley’s recipe for fudge, there the hand was back again, on her shoulder or arm — even, if not caught in time, on her leg or her breast — the skin shrinking and tingling with horrified delight, her throat obstructed so that she had to gulp two or three times to get her breath normal again. It created in her a curious sort of panic, more confused than frightened; she simply didn’t understand it. Its threat was much more profound than anything she had guessed the existence of. Factually she was anything but ignorant; two of her school friends had already become mothers before she left home; another had been disgraced and the details were known to her; while she had never actually seen a man naked she knew the geography of the male form as well as she did that of Illinois, her native state; and she knew that girls trembled and lost their heads — lucky if that was all — under certain trying conditions. She herself had momentarily trembled now and then, having indeed on one occasion been sufficiently aroused so that by way of reaction she almost cracked the young man’s head in two. But this was so different that it was not the same thing at all. Pete Halliday had not once offered to touch her; she had no reason to suppose that the idea had ever occurred to him; and yet she would sit at night on the little chair at the dressing-table she shared with Cecelia, her hair down over her shoulders like a rich dark shawl, the brush forgotten and idle in her hand, lost in a vague but overwhelming expectancy that seemed to begin in her stomach and spread irresistibly — destroying even the wish to resist — throughout every drop of her blood and every ounce of her flesh. It came with greatest force just then and there, with the hairbrush in her hand, for he had used that brush himself one evening on his own tangled hair, having walked four miles in Chicago’s March wind with no hat.