Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/161

 not even a newspaper interviewer—got much further on that point. The recorded year of her arrival in Chicago was 1897; her name had been Agnes Dehan; and she started her business career in the position of a stenographer, as Lucas Cullen repeatedly recalled. She found employment first with a tobacco firm on Wabash Avenue near the river; then she applied for and was given a position in the office of John Cullen on Dearborn Street. There Oliver met her and immediately fell in love with her.

Oliver had always kept a photograph of her as she was at that time,—a girl of medium height, well proportioned but thin. She was never meant to be so slender as she was; her frame was expressive of too great vigor for so little flesh. One knew, in gazing upon her picture, that she needed filling out and, when filled out, would be a beautiful and forceful woman. It was plain that, not long before her employment in the Cullen offices, she had passed through some extraordinary experience which had tremendously sapped her vitality. Not only her thinness betrayed this but also the expression of her lips and the look in her eyes. She had endured some frightful ordeal which temporarily had downed her but had not beaten her; it haunted her, but she was to overcome it; that was what her lips and her eyes silently said.

Many men offered themselves, after their various ways, to take up her battle for her,—men from her own station in life, men from situations usually considered below hers and from places deemed decidedly higher. But only Oliver Cullen, after his fifth or sixth attempt, succeeded in offering himself aright.

This was in '99, after John Cullen had dismissed Agnes Dehan, not for any fault in her work, but be-