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Updated: October 22, 2025
"You'll have to explain that you didn't write the first answers." Betton halted. "Well I I more or less dictated them, didn't I?" "Oh, virtually, they're yours, of course." "You think I can put it that way?" "Why not?" The secretary absently drew an arabesque on the blotting-pad. "Of course they'll keep it up longer if you write yourself," he suggested. Betton blushed, but faced the issue.
But I wanted to ask you if there isn't something else I can do on the days when there's no writing." He turned his glance toward the book-lined walls. "Don't you want your library catalogued?" he asked insidiously. "Had it done last year, thanks." Betton glanced away from Vyse's face. It was piteous, how he needed the job! "I see. ... Of course this is just a temporary lull in the letters.
That's funny," said Vyse, with a damp forehead. "Yes, it's funny; it's funny," said Betton. He leaned back, his hands in his pockets, staring up at the ceiling, and noticing a crack in the cornice. Vyse, at the corner of the writing-table, waited. "Shall I get to work?" he began, after a silence measurable by minutes. Betton's gaze descended from the cornice.
They had seen a lot of each other for the few years after both had left Harvard: the hard happy years when Betton had been grinding at his business and Vyse poor devil! trying to write. The novelist recalled his friend's attempts with a smile; then the memory of one small volume came back to him. It was a novel: "The Lifted Lamp." There was stuff in that, certainly.
Kansas, in its fifth annual report issued in 1889, gives a section to working-women. The commissioner, Mr. Frank Betton, considers the returns imperfect, great difficulty having been experienced in securing them. The average weekly wage is given as $5.17. Expenses are carefully analyzed, and there is a report of the remarks of employers, as well as from a number of those employed.
"Oh, my dear fellow " Betton protested, flushing. "What do you mean, then? Don't I answer the letters as you want them answered?" Betton anxiously stroked his silken ankle. "You do it beautifully, too beautifully. I mean what I say: the work's not worthy of you. I'm ashamed to ask you " "Oh, hang shame," Vyse interrupted. "Do you know why I said I shouldn't have time to dress to-night?
"Hang it all, I sha'n't be sorry. They interest me. They're remarkable letters." And Vyse, without observation, returned to his writings. The spring, that year, was delicious to Betton. His college professor continued to address him tersely but cogently at fixed intervals, and twice a week eight serried pages came from Florida.
So charming, in fact, was this phase of sentimental suspense that he felt a start of resentment when a telegram apprised him one morning that Vyse would return to his post that day. Betton had slept later than usual, and, springing out of bed with the telegram in his hand, he learned from the clock that his secretary was due in half an hour.
Maine, in the report for 1888, took up many questions of general interest, with their incidental bearings on the work of women; and in 1889 came another report from Kansas, in which the labor commissioner, Mr. Frank Betton, gave large space to an investigation conducted under many difficulties, but covering the ground very fully.
"Every house is a mad-house at some time or another." Betton rose with a careless shake of the shoulders. "This one will be if I talk to you much longer," he said, moving away with a laugh. BETTON did not for a moment believe that Vyse suspected the valet of having written the letters. "Why the devil don't he say out what he thinks? He was always a tortuous chap," he grumbled inwardly.
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