ADVICE TO TO LOVELORN
I
MISS ANN AUSTIN came briskly into her little cupboard of a room at the back of the Evening Planet office. She hung up her hat and coat, opened her rolltop desk, put her small handbag carefully in a drawer, and looked at herself in a greenish mirror that hung secretly on a hook in the recess under the pigeonholes. She took the rubber hood off her typewriter, poured three paper cupfuls of drinking water on the potted geranium on the windowledge, wound up the cheap clock on top of the desk, and moved it forward ten minutes to compensate for what it had lost during the night. Now she was ready for work. As she wound up the clock, the usual thought occurred to her—when would she be able to buy herself the handsome little wrist watch she coveted? There were a lot of them in the jeweller's shop on Park Row, and she admired them every morning on her way to the office. But when one is supporting one's self and an invalid mother in an uptown apartment, and has to pay for a woman to come in during the day to lend a hand, all on fifty dollars a week, in an era of post-bellum prices, wrist watches have to wait. However, as Ann made the daily correction in her laggard clock she used to say to herself: “There's a better time coming.” She was not devoid of humour, you see.
Then the office boy would bring in the big pile of morning mail, grinning as he laid it on the pullout slide of her desk. He may be excused for grinning, because Ann was the kind of creature who would bring a smile to the surliest face. She was just a nice size, with a face that was both charming and sensible, and merry brown eyes (when it wasn't too close to the first of the month). Also, that pile of mail was rather amusing. Those letters, so many of them written on cheap pink or blue stationery and addressed in unsophisticated handwriting, were not directed to Miss Ann Austin, but to “Cynthia,” and the office boy knew pretty well the kind of messages that were in them. For Ann, under the pseudonym of “Cynthia,” conducted the Planet's department of Advice to the Lovelorn, and daily several score of puzzled or distracted beings bared their hearts to her. The pile of letters was growing bigger, too. The Planet, which was not a very flourishing paper just at that time, had started the Advice to the Lovelorn department a few months before, and had put Ann in charge of it because she had done so well writing sob stories. It was beginning to “pull” quite surprisingly as a circulation feature, especially since her smiling little picture, vignetted in a cut with a border of tiny hearts, had been put at the head of the column. Under the cut was the legend: “Cynthia, a Sympathetic Adviser in Matters of the Heart.” Ann didn't know whether to be pleased or not at the growing popularity of her feature. This was not quite the kind of thing she had hoped for when she entered the newspaper world. But—the more letters there were from the lovelorn, the sooner she might get that needed raise.
With a little sigh she got out her penknife, began slitting the envelopes, ceased to be Ann Austin and became Cynthia, the sage and gentle arbiter over her troubled parliament of love.
It was a task that required no small discretion and tact, because Cynthia, whatever her private misgivings, tried to perform it with some honest idealism. In the first place, the letters that were obviously merely humorous, or were amorous attempts to inveigle her into private correspondence, were discarded. Then the letters to be used in the next day's column had to be selected, and laid aside to be printed with her comment on the ethical or sociological problems involved. The remaining letters had all to be answered, and data noted down that would be useful in compiling the pamphlet “1001 Problems of Courtship” that the managing editor insisted on her preparing. He said it would be great circulation dope. Ann didn't care much for the managing editor, Mr. Sikes. He had a way of coming into her room, closing the door behind him, leaning over her desk, and saying: “Well, how's little Miss Cupid?” If it hadn't been for that habit of his, Ann would have spoken to him about a raise before now. But she had an uneasy feeling that it would not be pleasing to put herself in the position of asking him favours. She would have been still more disturbed if she had known that some of the boys in the city room used to talk about “Cupid and Sikey” when they saw him visit her room. They said it angrily, because Ann was a general office favourite. Even the coloured elevator man had brought his wooing problems to her one day, wanting to be reassured as to his technique.
It is all very well for you to scoff, superior reader, but letters such as Ann had to read every morning bring an honest pang to an understanding heart; particularly when that heart is in collaboration with twenty-two years of bright, brown-eyed, high-spirited girlhood. Perhaps you don't realize how many of us are young and ignorant and at work in offices, and absorbed, out of working hours, in the universal passion. A good many make shift to be cynical and worldly-wise in public, but who knows how ravishingly sentimental we are in private? Some say that Doctor Freud didn't tell the half of it. As that waggish poet Keith Preston has remarked,
Love, lay thy phobias to rest,
Inhibit thy taboo!
We twain shall share, forever blest,