Read Online Skyscraper by Faith Baldwin - Free Book Online Page A

raise. There’s enough in that trust fund to start us—I know I don’t get it till I’m twenty-five but there must be a way, there has to be a way.”
    She said, after a moment, “With what I make—and what you make—we could manage, I think.”
    She didn’t want to marry; not when she said it over to herself; but with Tom there—and those heart-piercing words still burning in her brain, “Why do I ever have to leave you?”—she surrendered.
    She must marry him, or lose him. She took her two small hands and pushed back the hair from her face. The widow’s peak was ruffled; it gave her an urchin, elfin look.
    â€œManage? Do you think,” shouted Tom, “that I’d let my wife keep on working?”
    He came of a generation of men whose wives had not worked. That is to say, they had kept houses and budgets, borne children, scrubbed and cooked and slaved and fought their way up into a little leisure and comfort. They had been pioneer women some of them, women who carried guns as well as babies, women who could wield an ax.
    But they had not worked for money.
    Or had they?
    They had not, at any rate, worked for wages.
    She said, startled, “But, Tom, unless I do go on working, it isn’t possible.”
    â€œWhy not—if you’re willing to sacrifice—”
    She cried out, wounded, “Oh, I am, you know I am! But look at us—Jennie and me. She gets forty a week, my salary comes to a little less, not counting the Christmas bonus. And we barely manage.”
    He said sullenly, “I won’t always be getting just fifty.”
    â€œNo. No. Of course, you won’t. But,” she cried again, “you haven’t thought of me at all—of how much I like my work, how anxious I am to get on with it.”
    â€œWhere to?” he demanded.
    She said, gray eyes dark with something near to anger. “There’s Sarah’s job sometime, if I fit myself for it. She isn’t going to stop either. Tom, I’m only twenty-two—by the time I’m thirty—”
    â€œBy the time you’re thirty, you’ll be an old woman,” he said absurdly. Then he went down on his knees beside her, awkward, boyish, touching.
    â€œI do love you so much—and you love me, you know you love me!”
    He pulled her down, close, closer, kissed her with longing, with anger, with frustration. After a long moment during which they both forgot all that had led up to this emotional climax, she drew herself away.
    â€œTom, please—we’re insane, both of us, we can’t go on like this, you’ll have to stop coming here, we’ll go out, the way we used to. I wish,” she said brokenly, “that I’d never left the club!” What she meant was, I wish I had not opened this particular door to temptation .
    â€œThen you won’t marry me?”
    â€œOh, Tom”—suddenly she was tired, beaten down by fatigue—“oh, Tom, don’t be childish! No, I won’t marry you and give up my job.”
    â€œThat’s enough, then.”
    He flung himself out of the door. When Jennie came in half an hour later Lynn was in bed. She was crying. Jennie had her moments of tact. She did not switch on the lights; she walked into her bedroom instead and spoke to Lynn from that distance. “Lousy evening,” reported Jennie, with a yawn. “I’m getting fed up with this sort of thing. Give you a two-fifty table d’hôte and think they can get funny with their hands for that price. Boy, even to the buyers my legs are worth forty a week—and hands off!”
    Lynn made no answer. She knew Jennie required none. Shewas grateful to Jennie. She ached all over, she was one vast bruise. It was finished, then? Tom had asked her to marry him, and she had refused. Or had she offered to marry Tom, and he had repudiated her? Both, she fancied, crying very quietly.
    She fixed herself