She went dismally home on the “L,” deriving a bitter satisfaction in picturing to herself what her days would be like, cooped up in an ill-ventilated back office with the swarthy, none-too-clean Mr. Abrahms, interviewing the none-too-clean customers who would be likely to patronize such a place. Still it was a job and she was a wage-earner again. There would be some comfort in announcing the news to Roy and to her mother and sister.
She found a message from Roy when she reached home. It had been brought by the clerk in Bannerman’s Drug Store. He had said, Alice repeated for the hundredth time, that Mr. Beardsley had ’phoned and asked him to tell Miss Jeannette Sturgis to come down at once to his office; he had said it was important. Alice didn’t know anything more than that; there wasn’t any use asking her questions; the clerk had just said that, and that was all.
“Perhaps he’s got a job for me!” Jeannette exclaimed with a wild hope. “He knows how badly I want one!”
“I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea.” Her sister turned back to the soapy water in the wash-tub where she was carefully washing some of her mother’s jabots.
“Well, I’ll fly.”
Jeannette hurried to her room, and jerked the tissue paper out of her best shirtwaist. Her fingers trembled as she re-dressed herself; the tiny loops that connected with small pearl buttons on her cuffs eluded her again and again until she was almost ready to cry with fury. She felt sure that Roy had a job for her; he would have telephoned for no other reason. In thirty minutes she was aboard the “L” again, rushing downtown.
As she crossed Union Square the gold sign of the Chandler B. Corey Company spreading itself imposingly across the façade of an ancient office building made her heart beat faster, and her rapid, breathless walk doubled with her excitement into almost a skip as she hurried along. Oh, there was good news awaiting her! She felt it!
The wheezy elevator bumped and rumbled as it leisurely ascended. At the fourth floor she stepped out into a reception room whose walls were covered with large framed drawings and paintings. There were some magazines arranged on a center table. The place smelt of ink and wet paste. A smiling girl rose from a desk and came toward her.
“I’ll see if he’s in,” she said in reply to Jeannette’s query and disappeared.
Upon an upholstered wicker seat in one corner of the room an odd-looking woman wearing a huge cart-wheel hat was talking animatedly to another who listened with a twisted, sour smile. They were discussing photographs, and the woman in the cart-wheel hat was handing them out one by one from a great pile in her lap. Jeannette was forced to listen.