While I was busy studying the faces of the men at the other desk Mr. Morton arrived without my being conscious of his approach. He spoke to me, and looking up I beheld a long, tall man, with becomingly gray hair. Now I like gray hair, and I also like eyes that meet mine calmly and as a matter of course when the owner is talking to me. There’s a difference in eyes—eyes that play hop, skip, and jump, trying to see everything, look everywhere except into the eyes of the person addressing them; eyes that stare at you as though wishing to jump out and snatch your eyes bald-headed, and eyes that have a predisposition to study the toes of shoes and the figures on the carpet, darting up once in a while to catch you off your guard, and perhaps murder you.
My interview with Mr. Morton was encouraging. He felt sure, he said, that if women of my “attainments” would offer their services they would be gladly accepted by the banks and similar corporations. As he saw conditions, if the war continued as long as persons in a position to know appeared to expect it would, half of the work of the Trust Company would have to be done by women.
“Everybody don’t agree with me,” he added. “Some think it unnecessary, my employing women here. Some of our men enlisted, many were called in the first draft, others will be caught in later drafts. The situation is serious, and I want to meet it.”
On learning that he was a Princeton graduate, I decided to give him a trial as a boss. Fortunately for me, he decided to give me a trial. After taking the names of my references and some more general conversation, he asked me to report for duty the next Monday morning.
On my return trip up-town I took stock of myself. Pat myself on the back as I might, I was forced to admit that my clothes, in their present condition, were not suited to a dweller in marble halls. Determined not to take my trunks from storage, I was even more set on continuing to live on my wages. What to do I did not know.
Being Friday I resolved to loaf until Monday. Leaving the surface car at Store Beautiful, I proceeded to carry out my resolve—loaf. Perhaps while doing so a solution of my problem might develop. But an hour spent in roaming through the most beautiful department store in the world only added to my conviction—the unfitness of my clothes to marble halls.
When I again faced the world on Broadway I was still struggling over the puzzle—how to get a dress suited to marble halls. Wool was prohibitive not only in price but because it was needed by our soldiers and the destitute Belgians; silk was far above the contents of my pocket-book, and cotton was winging its way upward so fast that I might be forced to join an aviation corps to get enough of it for a frock.
There was Fourteenth Street to be investigated—Fourteenth Street has solved many financial problems. So in and out of that wide street I nosed, like a pointer dog hunting for game ardently wished for though unscented. Finally down in a basement I came to a point—I actually pointed.
“That piece of cloth over there—what’s the price of it?”
The saleswoman looked at the cloth, then back at me. Her expression was of a person who had answered the same question many times.