Her sisters,
large, stout women, used to come and see her, and there was a
fashionably-dressed young man whom her mistress seemed to like very much.
Mr. Alden was his name, and Miss Rice told Esther that he, too, wrote
novels; they used to talk about each other's books for hours, and Esther
feared that Miss Rice was giving her heart away to one who did not care
for her. But perhaps she was satisfied to see Mr. Alden once a week and
talk for an hour with him about books. Esther didn't think she'd care, if
she had a young man, to see him come and go like a shadow. But she hadn't
a young man, and did not want one. All she now wanted was to awake in the
morning and know that her child was safe; her ambition was to make her
mistress's life comfortable. And for more than a year she pursued her plan
of life unswervingly. She declined an offer of marriage, and was rarely
persuaded into a promise to walk out with any of her admirers. One of
these was a stationer's foreman, and almost every day Esther went to the
stationer's for the sermon paper on which her mistress wrote her novels,
for blotting-paper, for stamps, to post letters--that shop seemed the
centre of their lives.
Fred Parsons--that was his name--was a meagre little man about
thirty-five. A high and prominent forehead rose above a small pointed
face, and a scanty growth of blonde beard and moustache did not conceal
the receding chin nor the red sealing-wax lips.
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