Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/22

12 on walking, for there was a fever in my blood that made me see double.

I may have saved my self-respect, but, in the language of the worker, I'd lost my job. I'd lost my job! That fact kept going back and forth in the empty garret of my head, like a bat in a house attic. I'd had my say; I'd set off my fireworks; I'd eased my soul of its anger; but now there was the piper to pay.

I was more than humiliated; I was stunned. Benjamin Locke had seemed something almost bloodless to me, as cold and metallic a thing as the Sherman statue in the Plaza. It gave me sudden and sickening doubts as to my own personality, to remember how I'd been the instrument that had brought Big Ben down from his pedestal. Was I the wrong sort, after all? I kept asking myself. Were all my ideas about fair dealing and right living only talk, only the crazy ideal of convent girls who forget the turgid streams that flow through every great city? And was the fight I'd been making for a footing in that upper world nothing more than the moonshine Big Ben's overtures tried to make it? And was it even worth while, I asked myself.

Something, in that moment of stress, fell away