I stared at him, and he, misinterpreting my expression, smiled jubilantly as he nodded his head in emphasis.
“I wonder if either of my three brothers could have told me?” I questioned, and I looked him straight in the eyes. “My brothers are all Americans.”
“I’m an American,” he asserted indignantly. “I was born——”
“I don’t care where you were born,” I interrupted. “No one, man or woman, who takes orders from a power outside the United States is an American. A person who takes orders from Rome is no more to be trusted than one who takes orders from Berlin. I’ll not sit by either.”
Grabbing my file in one hand and my chair in the other, I marched to the other end of the table. Two days later this man was caught on the roof caressing one of the youngest of the girls in our department—she had been taken from school to help her parents support the family. What the men employees did to this fellow I never knew. He did not return, not even to finish that day.
For one thing I am devoutly thankful—that Polly Preston is an American. It must be the most stupid of tasks to write about a human being who is forbidden to think for him or her self. I had as soon write about a white bait.
During the later part of September, while still working for the District Board for the City of New York, I moved my belongings from the Jane Leonard to the top floor of a rooming-house in Greenwich Village—in the same house and on the same floor with Hildegarde Hook. Having met this young woman at the Y. W. C. A. and learned from herself that she was a writer, and from the Association that she was a problem, I decided to put her on my list of those and that to be investigated.
Early in October the workers for the District Board began to be laid off. When my turn came I was not sorry. Jobs were plentiful, wages on the rise, and I was anxious to try another field.
CHAPTER XIII
“MORE DEADLY THAN THE MALE”
The day after leaving the District Board for the City of New York I called at the employment department of the Y. W. The head of the department greeted me cordially. She had plenty of jobs—up-town, down-town, in all the suburbs. Reading her card catalogue of openings she stated that the Suffrage Party was offering ten dollars a week for canvassers, to work from five to nine evenings.