ger, you know--I'm nearly at the end of
my tether. And then what can I do--how on earth am I to keep myself
alive? I see myself reduced to the fate of that poor Silverton
woman--slinking about to employment agencies, and trying to sell painted
blotting-pads to Women's Exchanges! And there are thousands and thousands
of women trying to do the same thing already, and not one of the number
who has less idea how to earn a dollar than I have!"

She rose again with a hurried glance at the clock. "It's late, and I must
be off--I have an appointment with Carry Fisher. Don't look so worried,
you dear thing--don't think too much about the nonsense I've been
talking." She was before the mirror again, adjusting her hair with a
light hand, drawing down her veil, and giving a dexterous touch to her
furs. "Of course, you know, it hasn't come to the employment agencies and
the painted blotting-pads yet; but I'm rather hard-up just for the
moment, and if I could find something to do--notes to write and
visiting-lists to make up, or that kind of thing--it would tide me over
till the legacy is paid. And Carry has promised to find somebody who
wants a kind of social secretary--you know she makes a specialty of the
helpless rich."

Miss Bart had not revealed to Gerty the full extent of her anxiety. She
was in fact in urgent and immediate need of money: money to meet the
vulgar weekly claims which could neither be deferred nor evaded. To give
up her apartment, and shrink to the obscurity of a boarding-house, or the
provisional hospitality of a bed in Gerty Farish's sitting-room, was an
expedient which could only postpone the problem confronting her; and it
seemed wiser as well as more agreeable to remain where she was and find
some means of earning her living. The possibility of having to do this
was one which she had never before seriously considered, and the
discovery that, as a bread-winner, she was likely to prove as helpless
and ineffectual as poor Miss Silverton, was a severe shock to her
self-confidence.

Having been accustomed to take herself at the popular valuation, as a
person of energy and resource, naturally fitted to dominate any situation
in which she found herself, she vaguely imagined that such gifts would be
of value to seekers after social guidance; but there was unfortunately no
specific head under which the art of saying and doing the right thing
could be offered in the market, and even Mrs. Fisher's resourcefuln