Earth and High Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

someone to talk to, then collapsed into the chair with her legs straight out, and closed her eyes again.
    She was aroused a minute later by her mother’s voice saying, “Oh, there you are, Erica. I’ve hardly seen you since you came in. I’m so glad you were able to get away in time for the party, darling.”
    â€œI have to go back to the office after dinner,” said Erica, yawning. “Special Red Cross story — they sent us the dope but the morning papers will use it as it is, so we’ll have to rewrite. After that there’s a Guild meeting.”
    â€œI didn’t know you’d joined the Guild,” said her mother, looking startled.
    â€œI joined last month, as soon as they really began organizing.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œPartly on general principles and partly because Pansy Prescott fired Tom Mitchell after he’d been on the Post for ten years, because he went on a five-day drunk after his wife died of TB up at Ste. Agathe.”
    â€œWell, I suppose ...”
    â€œIt wasn’t because of the bat,” interrupted Erica. “Or because Pansy doesn’t like women interfering with his arrangements, even indirectly after they’re dead — it was mostly because Tom was the chief organizer for the Guild. I thought if Tom could stick his neck out, so could I. The Post is all for unions provided their employees don’t join any,” she explained. “They have to put up with the linotype operators and the ...”
    â€œMr. Prescott will object to your joining, then, won’t he?”
    â€œYou bet,” said Erica placidly.
    â€œWhen I was your age, I didn’t even know men like that existed!” remarked her mother irrelevantly. In appearance, although not in temperament or in outlook, she and her daughter were very alike. They were about the same height, and Margaret Drake was still slender, with light brown hair which had once been even fairer than Erica’s and which she wore rather short and waved close to her head. She was intelligent, practical, and unusually efficient, born and bred in the Puritan tradition. She had very definite and inelastic convictions and had had the character to live up to them, and yet you could see in her face that somehow it had not come out quite right, although she herself was largely unaware of it, consciously at any rate. She never realized that the expression at the back of her blue eyes did not quite bear out what she said with such certainty and so little room for argument; it never occurred to her that there could be anything wrong with her system, but only, on the rare occasions when she had the time, and the still rarer occasions when she had the inclination, to think about Margaret Drake, that there must be something wrong with herself.
    â€œYou didn’t know Mr. Prescott,” said Erica.
    â€œIt seems funny to think of your joining a union. The Guild is a union, isn’t it?”
    â€œOh, yes, it’s a union. Or it will be someday if the Post doesn’t fire us all first.”
    Her mother glanced over the room, remarking absently, “I’m glad you got home in time, Eric,” and then remembering that she had said it before, she added, “I wouldn’t know how to give a party without you any more. You don’t know how much it means to Charles and me just to — just to have you around,” she said, smiling down at Erica. “All the same, you can’t spend the rest of the afternoon in that chair. Get up and be useful, darling.”
    â€œWhere shall I start?” asked Erica without much enthusiasm.
    â€œStart by doing something about that young man over there by the window. Madeleine was talking to him a while ago, but she seems to have disappeared.”
    â€œWho is he?”
    â€œI don’t know. He looks like the one René phoned about. His name sounded foreign so I suppose he’s a refugee.”
    â€œI don’t