Jean Stafford
THE BLEEDING HEART
Every morning and on alternate afternoons, Rose Fabri–
zio, a Mexican girl from the West, worked at a discreet girls' board–
ing school as secretary to the headmistress, a Miss Talmadge who
had a sweet voice. It was sweet even when she was dictating a warm
comeuppance to the laundry about
i~
mistreatment of the school's
counterpanes and bureau runners; and sweet when she was explain–
ing the value of physical education to a recalcitrant pupil who de–
clared that she loathed volleyball. Every day when she arrived short–
ly after Rose had unlocked the office and uncovered her typewriter,
Miss Talmadge cried "Good morning" twice and then she said with
a lilt, "How is our Westerner? Acclimated? Finding the charm of
New England both within and without?" She then stepped briskly
into her own office and made a great clatter with the files, rudely
flung up the window no matter what the thermometer said and set
to work like a whirlwind. At first Rose, who was twenty-one and
uncommonly sensitive, bridled at this greeting which she believed
to be subtly derisive, but now after two months, she knew that there
was no feeling behind it at all; Miss Talmage inquired,
in
the same
sweet rapid way, quite indifferent to the answers, about the parlor–
maid's fiance and the French teacher's needlepoint and the riding
master's brother's greenhouse. But even now, this rerrll,nder of her
origin (vague as it must be in Miss Talmadge's mind, for if she imag–
ined anything at all, she probably imagined cigar-store Indians and
clumps of sage) sometimes brought on a subcutaneous prickle and
distracted Rose from her shorthand so that on occasion she had
fetched up with sentences that could not possibly be parsed.
Except in the vocal presence of Miss Talmadge, she
was
ac–
climated and she
did
find New England charming, although she was
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