“There’s only five yards, and we can’t get any more like it,” she told me.
“What’s the price?”
“Oh, it’s cheap enough,” and taking the cloth from the shelf she spread it before me on the counter. “One dollar for the piece. We could get three times the money if there was enough of it for anything. It’s only twenty-seven inches wide.”
“I’ll take it.”
On leaving that counter with the parcel in my hand I hurried to the pattern department and there spent twenty cents. Fortunately, among the riffraff left behind by Alice and the hat-trimmer there were remnants of several spools of white cotton thread and a few inches of dark-brown cotton poplin.
Early the next morning I trudged up to the Y. W. C. A. with all the spool cotton and the scrap of poplin in my bag, and a neatly folded parcel under my arm. When I quitted the sewing-room late that afternoon I carried with me a dress in which at that time it would have been equally appropriate to visit a tenement or dine in a palace. Besides being patriotic it was also the height of fashion—cotton khaki, severely tailored, with a long tie of dark brown.
Up to that time, aside from room-rent and food, my expenditures had been limited to one pair of shoes, seven dollars; one union suit, fifty-nine cents; one picture show, ten cents; two evenings at church, twenty-five cents in the plate each time. I admit that such an existence of grinding toil is only possible to a girl of character. Polly Preston is a girl of character. So also were a large majority of those with whom I had worked. Had such not been the case millions instead of thousands would have fallen by the wayside, succumbing to the conditions amid which women were forced to work before the entrance of our country into the World War. At that time the life of a working woman was of no more value than that of a dog. Yet had our working women ceased to be virtuous our country must have perished.
Now I have come to one of the two most disagreeable experiences of my four years. Perhaps the hardest for me to describe with equal justice to myself and the people among whom I worked.
On reporting at the T. Z. Trust Company at the time appointed by Mr. Morton, I learned that though he had not arrived he had instructed his secretary how to dispose of me. When she told me that Mr. Morton had decided to place me in the loan department, it was evident that she expected me to be greatly pleased. I did my best not to disappoint her. But to tell the truth the name meant as much to me as an inscription over a Hindu temple. And I could have conducted services in a Hindu temple as intelligently as I did the work in that department during my first few days.
After passing through several gates opening into private compartments fenced off by heavy bronze wire netting we entered the loan department. Once there I saw that it was at the rear of the bank, and that it had two windows similar to those of a bank for the use of customers. In the way of furniture there were two flat-topped desks, a large one and a smaller, two bookkeeper’s desks, a large iron safe on wheels, a ticker and its basket, and several chairs.