“Well, I do feel keenly about this war. I feel keenly with every drop of blood in my body. There’s no use discussing it. You were speaking of your work. If you’d do publicity work——”
“Publicity work? I’d be only too glad to, but they say I’ve no training.”
No training! A woman who had written a half-score of popular novels, a number of short stories, and a multitude of articles!—no training!
“But did they know who you are? Did you give your name?” I asked—the idea that this woman did not have sufficient training as a writer to do publicity work seemed the height of absurdity.
She shook her head. She had tried every organization, she assured me. At the beginning of hostilities she might have gotten a position in Washington City, but the salary seemed too small. Now she regretted having refused that—if she had only known that the war would last so long, and that people would continue to read only war stories!
She was over her head in debt, she told me. Every piece of property she possessed had been mortgaged up to the hilt. If the war continued she would be on the street, without even a roof to cover her. What must she do?
Yet when I told her what I was doing I saw the surprise in her eyes change to contempt. It was all right to go through the tenements, even to live in them, for the sake of getting material. To live there for the sake of making both ends meet, to make my living, or even to take money for my work! That was another matter—put me quite beyond the pale of her respect.
When I assured her that, beginning at one dollar a day, I had worked my way up to ninety dollars a month, I saw that the last amount sounded good to her. And I also saw that even as the salary offered by the government had not been large enough to get her to work for her country, ninety dollars was not sufficient to cause her to forget her “position” as a novelist. It was a case of debt rather than dishonor.
Suddenly she discovered a reason to take a hurried departure. I felt no inclination to detain her. While working my way from a dollar a day to ninety the month I had learned
“I am the master of my fate,