Becoming thoroughly engrossed by my effort to make out the cards, I was startled when some one announced that it was past eleven o’clock. Two hours and a half had passed and I had addressed twenty-seven envelopes. With a pang of horror I realized that I could not distinguish the features of women less than ten feet away.
“Is this Blank’s Magazine?” I demanded of the assistant manager. When she replied in the affirmative my indignation, goaded by fear of having permanently injured my eyes, frothed over. “All of my life—before I was born Blank’s Magazine has been proclaiming its interest in women—its efforts to help working women. Here you not only underpay them but give work to destroy their eyes. Take your file.”
Snatching my hat and coat I hurried from the building without waiting to put them on. Fortunately the cold air of the street brought me to my senses. Stepping again from the building—this time clothed in my right mind as well as my hat and coat—I took the newspaper from my pocket for the purpose of consulting the help-wanted column.
The sheet was a blurred mass of indistinct figures and lines. I could not make out a word. Thoroughly alarmed I hurried back to my room. There deciding to wait until after the lunch-hour before consulting an oculist, I dropped down on the bed and buried my head in the pillow, determined not to give way to tears. The arrival of the expressman with Alice’s trunk aroused me. It was nearly five o’clock and my sight had become normal.
That evening when Alice came from work she found our little table set for our first meal and our dinner ready to take up.
“You’ll have to get out the knife you brought from home,” I explained after her first gust of enthusiasm had subsided. “Sixty cents seemed about all we could spare this week for kitchen and dining-room furnishings.”
“Sixty cents!” she cried. “I was just thinking these forks and spoons the real thing—things you brought from home.”
“Two and a half cents each,” was my reply as I set the pan of rice in the centre of the table. “For the present we’ll have to serve ourselves directly from the cooking utensils.”
“It will save dish-washing,” she approved, as she took a chop from the pie-plate on which it had been broiled. “But where is the soup?”
“Soup! You don’t mean that you expect both soup and meat for the same dinner?”