Newspaper Page Text
Pufelipd on I lie firsl Sunday of each month as a section of the N. V. American, Boston American, Chicago Examiner, Hearst’s American, Atlanta, Ga.,and the second Sunday of each month with the San Francisco Examiner and Los Angeles Examiner
‘And yet can you blame
me?” She seized his
head fiercely, bent it
back and kissed him
Chapter V
IIEN Emmy and her mother ar
rived in New York they went to
a small boarding-house on East
Twenty - fourth Street, recom
mended to them by some friends
who had spent several weeks
there while visiting the city. It
was a quiet, old-fashioned house,
with an atmosphere of dignity about it which
even the little white slip of paper, with the words
“Rooms and Board,” pasted on the casing of the
doorway, could not entirely destroy.
The place was like most of its kind. It was
steeped in an unmistakable and characteristic odor,
composed apparently of equal parts of soap, cooking
and escaping gas, with a sub-flavor of mould. I he
dining-room in the basement held one large table
and three smaller ones, all waited on by a huge and
militant-looking colored girl, black as Erebus.
Here there gathered, at meal-times, a middle-aged
couple, who sat through their meals in stony and
aggrieved silence, as though reproaching the world
for its levity; an elderly clerk in a nearby depart
ment store; a widow, who treasured her grief as
apparently her sole earthly possession; a musician,
who talked shop incessantly; a young woman, with
glasses, who taught school; a mysterious man, with
Synopsis of Previous Chapters—‘‘My only asset in the world is
iny good looks,” concludes Emmy Moran early in her life in a small
town of the middle west. Emmy is quite as determined to be tech
nically a good woman as her conventional sister Katie. Katie is
horrified at Emmy’s evidences of what she considers “mental immor
ality.” While Emmy scorns the low salaried youths of her neigh
borhood, Katie accepts one. Soon after the wedding Mr. Moran
dies, leaving only a little insurance money. Emmy learns shorthand
and persuades her mother to come to New York with her scanty
capital and invest it in Emmy.
dark mustaches, who never spoke of his business at
all, and whom his fellow-boarders had decided
among themselves to be a desperate character (he
was, in reality, a salesman of ladies’ underwear);
and a young newspaper man, who cocked an approv
ing eye at Emmy, sitting next to him, and made
conversation about the weather and the butter.
This young man was, in a way, the star boarder,
since he occupied the parlor and adjoining alcove
bedroom on the ground floor. The parlor he called
his studio, and Emmy and her mother had not been
in the house a week before he invited them, one
Sunday morning, to visit it.
Emmy had arrived in the city on Tuesday, and
on Wednesday, in order that no time might be lost,
she had copied from a daily paper a long list of
advertisers desiring stenographers, and had started
out to call on them.
Her unfamiliarity with the town made it slow
work at first, and the lack of progress she made
rather discouraged her. It was her intention, if pos
sible, to secure a position with some large and
prominent house, or at least with a firm whose busi
ness, judging from its surroundings, was a prosper
ous one. Such houses, however, did not, it seemed,
advertise for stenographers. Those offices to which
she went were mostly small, insignificant-looking
places in second-rate buildings. One housed a
theatrical man, whose sole stock-in-trade appeared
to lie a battered typewriter and a huge stack of
photographs of stage celebrities. He told Emmy he
was a press agent, and invited her to go to a show.
Another proved to be a small hardware store, the
proprietor of which wanted her to wait on customers
while not busy 'at her machine. Still another was
the office of an insurance company, where scores of
girls were employed on routine work in a huge room,
and the clatter of machines was deafening. At
almost all the places she was asked for references,
and when she said she had no previous experience
her questioners seemed to lose interest in her. She
had counted on her personal charm to assist her,
but most of the men she saw were apparently too
busy to notice whether she was tall or short, black or
white. Those who did, made eyes at her and invited
her to lunch, or dinner. One young fellow, in a
small office on the top floor of a downtown sky
scraper, on whose door appeared only the legend,
“Timber Lands,” promptly asked her to marry him
and thus save needless expense on both their parts.
3
Copyright. 19H. Lv tb*» c *ar Co.