The first month, Mr. Brace went over Yetta's contributions in detail, cramming into her all the advice he could think of. About the time his stock of journalistic epigrams ran out, the reports from the circulation manager were so favorable, that he decided he could give his attention to other things. Mr. Brace, like all good newspaper men, was a mystic in such matters. God only knows what the public will like. It was his business to scatter seeds. If they took root and grew into "circulation," he had sense enough to leave them alone. And Yetta's column had "caught on."
At the end of three months the contract was renewed with a substantial increase in salary. The posters which advertised her work became more flamboyant. The size of her mail grew daily. The letters dealt with all the worries working girls are heirs to. Some of them were frivolous, most were commonplace. But once in a while among the misspelt, poorly written scrawls, there would be a throbbing story of life. Such letters tore at Yetta's heart—giving her new determinations, new enthusiasm for her work. As their number increased Yetta knew that her audience, her influence, was growing. The Fates were smiling at her. She was earning more money than she had ever hoped. Better still, she had as much time as before for the League work. She was rarely kept in the office after noon. It did not occur to her that she might have demanded an increase in salary on the ground of the free advertising she was giving The Star by her frequent speeches.
She was disappointed, however, not to be able to establish more cordial relations with her fellow-workers. These newspaper people, men and women, worked under as great a strain as any sweat-shop girls, but they seemed more foreign to her—to her class—than the rich uptown women she had met through the League. They had many good qualities which she appreciated—their esprit de corps, their hearty, open manners, the camaraderie with which they lent each other money. But they were shot through with a cynicism which shocked her. The whole situation was typified in the case of Maud Ripley, a special story writer, who tried to "take her up."
She was a tired-eyed, meagre woman of near forty. She was brilliant. Every one in the office referred to her for facts and figures instead of going to the encyclopædia. Some of the things she wrote appealed strongly to Yetta, others were utterly futile. Besides her signed articles, mostly interviews with prominent foreigners,—she was fluent in half a dozen modern languages,—she composed "The Meditations of a Marriageable Maid." She was rather proud of this cheap wit.
She seemed to like Yetta, but always introduced her as "The Star's new sob-squeezer." Apparently she saw nothing in the new recruit but a successful pathos writer—a rising star in the profitable business of starting tears.
This attitude, which Yetta encountered on all sides, hurt her. She read some of "Lilian Leberwurtz'" writings. She had discovered that the real name of this woman with whom she was expected to compete was Mrs. Treadway. It was hopeless slush; it sickened her. She tried vainly to picture the type of woman who could write such drivel seriously.
"Dine with me Sunday," Miss Ripley asked her one day. She always talked in the close-packed style of a foreign correspondent who telegraphs at a dollar a word. "My flat. People you ought to know."
Yetta was essentially inclusive, she did not like to turn her back on any proffered friendship. So at one the next Sunday she rang the bell of the uptown flat where Maud lived alone. There was one woman and three men in the parlor.