Lifted Masks; stories by Glaspell, Susan, 1882-1948

"Why, I supposed, of course, he walked down by the stairs," cried Freckles. "I never dreamed he'd want to trust the elevator after the way she had acted."

"The door was locked," snarled the eminent lobbyist.

"Well, now, you see, I didn't know that," explained Freckles expansively. "Late in the afternoon I took a run up just to test the car--and there you were! I never was so surprised in my life. I supposed, of course, sir, that you'd spent the afternoon in the Senate, along with everybody else."

Once more the Governor put his hand to his mouth.

"Your case will come before the executive council at its next meeting, William. And if anything like this should happen again, you will be discharged on the spot." Freckles bowed. "You may go now."

When he was almost at the door the Governor called to him.

"Don't you think, William," he said--the Governor felt that he and Freckles could afford to be generous--"that you should apologise to the gentleman for the really grave inconvenience to which you have been the means of subjecting him?"

Freckles' little grey eyes grew steely. He looked at Henry Ludlow, and there was an ominous silence. Then light broke over his face. "On behalf of the elevator," he said, "I apologise."

And a third time the Governor's hand was raised to his mouth.

The next week Freckles was wearing a signet ring; long and audibly had he sighed for a ring of such kind and proportions. He was at some pains in explaining to everyone to whom he showed it that it had been sent him by "a friend up home."

V

FROM A TO Z

Thus had another ideal tumbled to the rubbish heap! She seemed to be breathing the dust which the newly fallen had stirred up among its longer dead fellows. Certainly she was breathing the dust from somewhere.

During her senior year at the university, when people would ask: "And what are you going to do when you leave school, Miss Willard?" she would respond with anything that came to hand, secretly hugging to her mind that idea of getting a position in a publishing house. Her conception of her publishing house was finished about the same time as her class-day gown. She was to have a roll-top desk--probably of mahogany--and a big chair which whirled round like that in the office of the under-graduate dean. She was to have a little office all by herself, opening on a bigger office--the little one marked "Private." There were to be beautiful rugs--the general effect not unlike the library at the University Club--books and pictures and cultivated gentlemen who spoke often of Greek tragedies and the Renaissance. She was a little uncertain as to her duties, but had a general idea about getting down between nine and ten, reading the morning paper, cutting the latest magazine, and then "writing something."

Commencement was now four months past, and one of her professors had indeed secured for her a position in a Chicago "publishing house." This was her first morning and she was standing at the window looking down into Dearborn Street while the man who was to have her in charge was fixing a place for her to sit.