I felt like a prisoner facing the jury which is about to announce its verdict
At last he said: "Well, you look pretty reliable. I guess I'll trust you the goods for thirty days."
It was all I could do to restrain myself from invoking benedictions on his head and kissing his hands as my mother would have done under similar circumstances
"So I do have a 'credit face'!" I exclaimed to myself, gleefully
When I found myself in the street again I looked at my reflection in store windows, scanning my "credit face."
The Chaikins took it for granted that I had paid for the goods on the spot
Things brightened up at our "factory." I ordered an additional sewing-machine of the instalment agent and hired two operators—poor fellows who were willing to work fourteen or fifteen hours a day for twelve dollars a week. (The union had again been revived, but it was weak, and my employees did not belong to it.) As for myself, I toiled at my machine literally day and night, snatching two or three hours' sleep at dawn, with some bundles of cut goods or half-finished cloaks for a bed. Chaikin spent every night, from 7 to 2, with me, cutting the goods and doing the better part of the other work. Mrs. Chaikin, too, lent a hand. Leaving Maxie in the care of her mother, she would spend several hours a day in the factory, finishing the cloaks
The five hundred cloaks were shipped on time. I was bursting with consciousness of the fact that I was a manufacturer—that a big firm out West (a firm of Gentiles, mind you!) was recognizing my claim to the title.
I was American enough to be alive to the special glamour of the words, "out West."
Goods in our line of business usually sold "for cash," which meant ten days.