Show him one hour of overtime on that card!
I showed him where every night the time clock registered overtime.
Yes, but not once was it a full hour. And didn't I know overtime never counted unless it was at least a full hour?
No, he had never explained anything about that. I'd worked each night until everything was done and I'd been told I could go.
Well, of course he didn't want to rob me. I really had nothing coming to me. Each night I'd stayed on till about 6. But they would figure it out and see what they could pay me. They figured. I waited. At length majestically he handed out fifty-six cents.
The fat, older brother in the firm rode down in the elevator with me—he who used to move silently around the factory about four times a day, squinting out of his beady eyes, such light as shown there bespeaking 100 per-cent possession. He held his fat thumbs in the palms of his fat hands and benignly he was wont to survey his realm. Mine! Mine! Mine! his every inch of being said. Nor could his proportion of joy have been greater if he had six floors of his own to survey, instead of one little claptrap back room. It did make him so happy. He wore a kindly and never-changing expression, and he never spoke.
Going down in the elevator, he edged over to my corner. He pinched my arm, he pinched my cheeks. Ach, but he'd miss me bad. Nice girl, I was.
Evidently he, too, had evolved a moral equivalent for a living wage. Little kindly personal attentions were his share for anything not adequately covered by twelve dollars and fifty-six cents.