To end, once and for all, the killing suspense, the room wherein Daisy Reynolds toiled for the first three years of her business career was a telephone exchange.
And at the three years’ end, she was assigned to the job of day-operator at the Clavichord Arms.
The pay at the hotel was no larger than at the exchange; but there was always the possibility of tips, and the certainty of Christmas-money. Besides, there were chances to rest or to read between calls. On the whole, Daisy rejoiced at the change—as might a private who is made corporal.
The Clavichord Arms is a glorious monument to New York’s efforts at boosting the high cost of living. The building occupies nearly a third of a city block, in length and depth, and it towers to the height of nine stories. Its facade and main entrance and cathedral-like lobby are rare samples of an architecture whose sacred motto is, “Put all your goods in the show-window.�
When the high cost of living first menaced our suffering land, scores of such apartment-houses sprang into life, in order that New Yorkers might do their bit toward the upkeep of high prices. Here, at a rental ranging from fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars a year, one may live in quarters almost as commodious as those for which a suburbanite or smaller city’s dweller pays fifty dollars a month.
And nobly did New York rally to the aid of the men who sought thus to get its coin. So quickly did the new apartments fill with tenants that more and yet more and more such buildings were run up.
Men who grumbled right piteously at the advance of bread from five to six cents a loaf eagerly paid three thousand dollars a year for the privilege of living in the garish-fronted abodes, and they sneered at humbler friends who, for the same sum, rented thirty-room mansions in the suburbs.
And this, by prosy degrees, brings us back to Daisy Reynolds.
The Clavichord Arms’ interior decorator had used up all his ingenuity and his appropriation before he came to the cubby-hole behind the gilded elevators—the cubby-hole that served as the telephone-operator’s quarters. The cubby-hole was airless, windowless, low and sloped of ceiling, calcimined of wall, and equipped with no furniture at all except the switchboard-desk, a single kitchen chair, one eight-candle-power electric light and an iron clothes-hook.
Here, for eight hours a day, sat Daisy Reynolds. Here, with stolid conscientiousness, she manipulated the plugs, that the building’s seventy tenants might waste their own and their friends’ time in endless phone-chats.