"Some of us," he admitted, dryly. "You found it hard work at first?
Sometimes, when I hear stories like yours, Miss Grant, when I pass young
girls, thin, white-faced, poorly-clothed, going to their work, with the
look of old men on their faces--I mean old men, not women, mind!--I ask
myself whether there is not some special place, with a special kind of
punishment, appointed for selfish fathers, who have consigned their
daughters to life-long toil and misery. I beg your pardon!"
"No, I don't think my father was selfish," said Celia, more to herself
than to her listener. "Not consciously so; he was sanguine, too
sanguine; he lived in the moment----"
"I know," said Mr. Clendon. "Some men are born like that, and can't help
themselves. Well, what did you do?"
"Oh, it was what I tried to do," said Celia, with a laugh. "I tried to
do all sorts of things. But no one seemed inclined to give me a chance
of doing anything; and, as I say, I was on the point of giving in, when
I met in the street, and quite by chance, an old acquaintance of my
father. He is a literary man, an antiquarian, and he is writing a big
book; he has been writing it, and I think will continue to write it, all
his life. He wanted, or said he wanted, a secretary, someone to look up
facts and data at the British Museum; and he offered me the work.
I--well, I just jumped at it. Fortunately for me, I have had what most
persons call a good education. I know French and one or two other
foreign languages, and although I have 'little Latin and less Greek,' I
manage to do what Mr. Bishop wants. He gives me a pound a week; and
that's a very good salary, isn't it? You see, so many persons can do
what I am doing."
"Yes, I suppose so," Mr. Clendon assented; he glanced at the slight,
girlish figure in its black dress, at the beautiful face, with its clear
and sweetly-grave eyes, the soft, dark hair, the mobile lips with a
little droop at the ends which told its story so plainly to the
world-worn old man who noted it. "And you work in the Reading Room all
day?"
"Yes," said Celia, cheerfully, and with something like pride. "It is a
splendid place, isn't it? Sometimes I can scarcely work, I'm so
interested in the people there. There are so many types; and yet there
is a kind of sameness in them all. One seems to lose one's identity the
moment one enters, to become merged in the general--general----"