The Wall Street Girl. Bartlett Frederick Orin

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СКАЧАТЬ don’t have to do anything but keep straight and keep at work. You ought to have taken those circulars home with you last night and learned them by heart.”

      “I’ve read ’em. But, hang it all, they don’t mean anything.”

      “Then find out what they mean. Keep at it until you do find out. The firm isn’t going to pay you for what you don’t know.”

      “But last night–well, a man has to get around a little bit.”

      “Around where?” she questioned him.

      “Among his friends. Doesn’t he?”

      She hesitated.

      “It seems to me you’ll have to choose between dances and business.”

      “Eh?”

      She nodded.

      “Between dances and business. I tell you, this next six months is going to count a lot on how you make good with Farnsworth.”

      “Well, he isn’t the only one,” he said.

      “He’s the only one in this office–I know what I’m talking about.”

      “But outside the office–”

      She put down her fork.

      “I don’t know why I’m mixing up in your business,” she declared earnestly. “Except that I’ve been here three years now, and have seen men come and go. Every time they’ve gone it has been clear as daylight why they went. Farnsworth is square. He hasn’t much heart in him, but he’s square. And he has eyes in the back of his head.”

      She raised her own eyes and looked swiftly about the room as if she half-expected to discover him here.

      “What’s the matter?” he inquired.

      She did not answer his question, but as she ran on again she lowered her voice:–

      “You’ve been in his office to-day?”

      “He gave me some more circulars,” Don admitted.

      “Then you’d better believe he knew you didn’t get to bed last night until 4 a.m. And you’d better believe he has tucked that away in his mind somewhere.”

      Don appeared worried.

      “He didn’t say anything.”

      “No, he didn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything until he has a whole collection of those little things. Even then he doesn’t say much; but what he does say–counts.”

      “You don’t think he’s getting ready to fire me?” he asked anxiously.

      “He’s always getting ready,” she answered. “He’s always getting ready to fire or advance you. That’s the point,” she went on more earnestly. “What I don’t understand is why the men who come in here aren’t getting ready too. I don’t see why they don’t play the game. I might stay with the firm twenty years and I’d still be pounding a typewriter. But you–”

      She raised her eyes to his. She saw that Don’s had grown less dull, and her own warmed with this initial success.

      “You used to play football, didn’t you?” she asked.

      “A little.”

      “Then you ought to know something about doing things hard; and you ought to know something about keeping in training.”

      “But look here, it seems to me you take this mighty seriously.”

      “Farnsworth does,” she corrected. “That’s why he’s getting ten thousand a year.”

      The figures recalled a vivid episode.

      “Ten thousand a year,” he repeated after her. “Is that what he draws?”

      “That’s what they say. Anyway, he’s worth it.”

      “And you think I–I might make a job like that?”

      “I’ll bet I’d try for it if I were in your boots,” she answered earnestly.

      “I’ll bet you’d land it if you were in my boots.” He raised his coffee-cup. “Here’s to the ten thousand a year,” he drank.

      Miss Winthrop rose. She had talked more than she intended, and was somewhat irritated at herself. If, for a second, she thought she had accomplished something, she did not think so now, as he too rose and smiled at her. He handed her the pasteboard box.

      “Your two dollars is in there,” he explained.

      She looked perplexed.

      “Shall I wait five minutes?”

      “Yes,” she answered, as he thrust the box into her hands.

      That box worried her all the afternoon. Not having a chance to open it, she hid it beneath her desk, where it distracted her thoughts until evening. Of course she could not open it on the Elevated, so it lay in her lap, still further to distract her thoughts on the way home. It seemed certain that a two-dollar bill could not occupy all that space.

      She did not wait even to remove her hat before opening it in her room. She found a little envelope containing her two-dollar bill nestling in five dollars’ worth of roses.

      It was about as foolish a thing as she had ever known a man to do.

      She placed the flowers on the table when she had her supper. All night long they filled the room with their fragrance.

      CHAPTER VIII

      A MAN OF AFFAIRS

      When, with some eighteen dollars in his pocket, Don on Sunday ordered Nora to prepare for him on that day and during the following week a breakfast of toast, eggs, and coffee, he felt very much a man of affairs. He was paying for his own sustenance, and with the first money he had ever earned. He drew from his pocket a ten-dollar bill, a five-dollar bill, a two-dollar bill, and some loose change.

      “Pick out what you need,” he ordered, as he held the money toward her.

      “I don’t know how much it will be, sir. I’ll ask the cook, sir.”

      “Very well; ask the cook. About dinners–I think I’d better wait until I see how I’m coming out. Dinners don’t matter so much, any way, because they come after I’m through work.”

      Don ate his breakfast in the dining-room before the open fire, as his father used to do. In smoking-jacket and slippered feet, he enjoyed this as a rare luxury–even this matter of breakfasting at home, which until now had been merely a negative detail of routine.

      When he had finished he drew his chair closer to the flames and lighted a cigarette. He had been cutting down on cigarettes. He had always bought them by the hundred; he was now buying them by the box. Until this week he never realized that they represented money. He was paying now twenty-five cents for a box of ten; and twenty-five cents, as he had learned in the restaurant in the alley, СКАЧАТЬ