When the orders came in faster than they could handle them, Frankland & Connor jobbed them out again at fifty per cent. Georgia had three or four private stenographers on her list who were glad to pick up a little pin money on their employers' machines after hours. Perhaps in hours, too. She didn't know or care.
At the end of a twelvemonth she had paid off her debts, except the one to Mason, on which she sent interest.
She was also able to employ a woman to help her mother with the housework two afternoons a week.
Early in the firm's second year of existence, L. Frankland came in one Monday morning with a long face, a rare thing for her.
"I want to make a change," she said, "I'm not satisfied. I've been thinking it over. This isn't an impulse."
Georgia was genuinely distressed, because she had grown very fond of Miss Frankland. There was no more cheerful person in the world, she thought, than this dry, twinkling old maid. And she had hoped her feeling was returned. Real friendships were too rare to be tossed away so suddenly.
"I'm not satisfied," repeated L. Frankland, "because the present deal between us isn't fair. You've pulled the big half of the load ever since we started--so, give me a third interest instead of a half--I'd be better pleased, honest Injun, hope to die."
"Oh, shut up, Frank, and get to work. I've no time for foolishness," responded Georgia, much relieved. "Fifty-fifty it started and fifty-fifty it sticks."
Mrs. Talbot was beginning to break. Her bones ached barometrically before rain; she noticed that after she had been on her feet a great deal, on cleaning days for instance, her ankles began to puff. Also she learned to avoid short breath by taking the stairs more easily. Sometimes she grew dizzy and little black specks floated before her eyes.
Fortunately she regarded her symptoms as a series of disconnected, unrelated phenomena. The heart was one thing, the liver another, rheumatism a third. Swollen joints were still different. That came from overdoing. For different diseases different remedies. She took her medicine very conscientiously, treating her symptoms, not her annodomini.
She thought of her children as young, not of herself as old. She wasn't sixty yet, just the time when people learn at last to profit by experience--the same age as most of the people she knew, Mrs. Conway, for instance, and Mrs. Schweppe, Mrs. Keough and Mrs. Cochrane.