“Wait there, Maisie,” he called. He was so near me that, fancying he had made a mistake, I glanced back to see if he really was calling me. “Wanter make five dollars easy money?” he asked, grinning in my face.
I stepped up on the sidewalk and faced him. It was on a corner and under the full glare of an electric light.
“You go to hell,” I told him.
Had he come one step nearer I would have done my best to have sent him to hell. The ferule of a steel-framed umbrella is a dangerous weapon in the hands of an infuriated woman.
The next morning on being awakened by the alarm-clock I bounded out of bed only to sink back with a half-smothered wail of pain. The muscles of my feet, my ankles, and my legs up to the small of my back felt like red-hot cords suddenly drawn taut through my raw flesh. Every inch of me below my waist ached horribly. Involuntary tears sprang to my eyes. It took more than ten minutes for me to get a grip on myself. Then carefully and painfully I raised myself to a sitting position and finally stood on my aching feet.
The Metropolitan clock chimed for the first time that day as I halted at a subway entrance and bought a newspaper. Having determined to get work that would enable me to sit down until my feet and limbs stopped aching, my heart throbbed with pleasure on finding an advertisement for addressers. Knowing the importance of being among the early arrivals, I hurried to the place indicated.
“We pay one dollar a thousand,” the assistant manager, a young girl, informed me. “And please be careful with the file.”
It needed only a glance at the return address on the envelopes to assure me that we were working for one of the most widely known woman’s magazines in the world. Sure of having found a good job even at one dollar a thousand I glanced around me. The loft was in a large corner building and might have been well lighted as well as comfortably heated had the windows been washed. At first I mistook them for ground glass.
There were only fourteen women besides myself, though judging by the chairs and tables accommodations had been provided for fully two hundred. Having seen the number of women turned away by the mail-order house, this scarcity of workers caused me considerable surprise.
Drawing a card from the file I stared at it in astonishment. Instead of a distinctly written name and address in black ink on a white card this thing was in two shades of purple, the name and address stamped in purple on a thin glazed purple paper which was stretched on a purple cardboard frame. A woman across the table noticing my surprise explained that it was stencil-work.