“Aw, hear her!” he laughed. “Why, my darling, I’ll buy you your clothes and everything your little heart desires if only you’ll say ‘yes’ to me.”
“Martin, I’ll never say ‘yes’ until this is settled,” she said spiritedly, her eyes with a queer light in them.
Martin was serious for a moment.
“Sweet woman,” he said earnestly, “you can have it all. Divide it any way you like. I don’t care in the least. There’s plenty for the two of us.”
But Jeannette would consider nothing so indefinite. She did not want a great deal, but she wanted to feel sure of something that would be regarded as entirely her own. With difficulty she persuaded him to talk about the matter in earnest. They agreed that if his salary were equally divided, and Jeannette paid all the table expenses out of her half while he paid the rent and everything else out of his, that would be an equitable arrangement. That satisfied Jeannette; it gave her something to think about when she considered marrying him.
But even with this much settled, she was no nearer making up her mind than she had ever been. Marriage meant giving up the office, the close affiliations she had formed there. Propinquity had made her fellow-workers her friends; she knew them all intimately, knew something of their private lives, rejoiced or sorrowed with them at the inevitable changes of fortune. When an eminent surgeon from Germany performed a miraculous operation on Mr. Featherstone’s little son and gave him the use of his legs on which he had never walked, she shared his father’s joy; when Mr. Cavendish married a charming Vassar girl who was the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street banker, she congratulated him with a real pleasure; when Miss Holland’s seventeen-year-old nephew secured an appointment at Annapolis and successfully passed the entrance examination, she took keen satisfaction in her friend’s delight. She was shocked and saddened when Sandy MacGregor’s wife died, and when Mr. Allister was taken ill with pneumonia no one inquired more frequently about him while he struggled desperately to live, or felt more pleasure when it was announced he had turned the corner and would before long be back again at his desk. She was glad when Francis Holme, Walt Chase and Sandy MacGregor each received a substantial gift of the company’s common stock at Christmas-time, and was correspondingly sorry that Horatio Stephens and Willis Corey shared equally in the honorarium. When Miss Peckenbaugh asked for a raise in salary, and her request was endorsed by Mr. Allister, she took it upon herself to tell Mr. Corey certain facts about the young lady that had become known to her, and when as a result, the request was refused and Miss Peckenbaugh in anger resigned, she was amused and delighted. At the same time she urged and secured a five-dollar raise per week for old Major Ticknor who had a little blind grandchild he was helping to maintain in a private sanitarium. Young Tommy Livingston in the bindery had impressed her upon a certain occasion with his brightness and ability, and she recommended him warmly to Mr. Corey, and had the satisfaction of seeing him promoted to a desk in Mr. Kipps’ department. At her suggestion, window-boxes filled with flowers were put along the windows of the press-room that faced the street; she persuaded the firm to install a lunch-room for the women employees on the eighth floor, and it was her idea that a regular trained nurse be engaged and established in a small but complete infirmary within the building. She induced Mr. Corey to offer a certain rising young author, whose work had been her discovery and who was showing steady improvement, an increase in royalty percentage, and she prevented the publication of a certain piece of fiction, which Corey had given her to read, because she considered it vicious, despite Mr. Allister’s strong recommendation. She advised her chief to instruct Horatio Stephens to order a series of articles from a woman writer whose work in another magazine had interested her, and she urged him not to engage a certain Madame Desseau of Paris, a designer of women’s clothes, as the fashion editor of The Ladies’ Fortune. Jeannette had a hand in almost every important step that was taken. Mr. Corey respected her judgment, frequently consulted her, and sometimes followed her advice even when contrary to his inclinations. He often told her that he believed her intuition was unerring and the greatest possible help to him.
§ 10
That particular winter proved an exceptionally strenuous and exacting one for Mr. Corey. He was worn out with work and with the ever increasing demands upon him, demands that came more and more from the outside.
The P. P. Prescott Publishing Company, a house with a reputation of half a century of high literary output, through mismanagement was in danger of bankruptcy. While the “P P P” books were famous the world over, the bank that had financed the concern for years was tired of the arrangement; the tottering house owed the Chandler B. Corey Company nearly a hundred thousand dollars for subscription premiums Francis Holme had sold it, and it was a foregone conclusion that if the Prescott Company failed, there would be no way of collecting the debt. Mr. Corey wanted to take over the Prescott Company entirely,—it could have been bought at the time for practically nothing by assuming its obligations,—but this was one of their chief’s bold and brilliant ideas that Mr. Kipps and Mr. Featherstone opposed and, to Jeannette’s intense regret, persuaded him against. The result was that instead of absorbing the Prescott Company, and letting the Corey organization administer its various activities, Mr. Corey was forced to become chairman of the board which undertook to put the older publishing house on its feet again, and to do most of the work himself.
In addition to this he was compelled to accept the leadership of a committee appointed by the Publishers’ Association to confer with the postal authorities in Washington regarding the rates on second class mail matter which were in danger of being raised. He had been obliged to make several trips to the capital. He was one of the directors of a large paper mill which, in conjunction with some other publishers, he had purchased. He had shown an interest in local politics and had been put on the Republican State Central Committee; he was one of the governors of the Swanee Valley Golf Club, and executor of the estate of Julius Zachariah Rosenbaum, a wealthy Jewish capitalist, whose autobiography he had published during the old Hebrew’s life. No one outside the immediate members of the firm, with the exception of Jeannette, knew that Rosenbaum had taken sixty thousand subscriptions to Corey’s Commentary when the story of his life was appearing in serial form in that magazine, and when the book was published he ordered twenty-five thousand copies, presumably to distribute among his friends. Poor Rosenbaum! It was doubtful if he had a score, and when he died there was universal rejoicing throughout the country that the most grasping of moneyed barons, who had consistently obstructed the wheels of progress, was gone. But he left a large slice of his wealth in charitable endowments, and named Chandler B. Corey as one of the executors of his will.