Go, leave me in my misery,
And when thou art alone,
God grant that thou may’st pine for me,
As I for thee have pone.
It was signed “Harry,” and that’s what hurt her heart. I told her it was Tabor’s writing; that his first name was Harry, and she was glad.
As I write this, I look across the street to the barber-shop where Inez Boyd is having her hair cut short. Ye Gods! faded and then amputated! So will be her pure young life. Already the frost of sin has settled around her soul. Youth’s bloom has been blighted; her cheeks are hollow; her eyes have a vacant, far-away look. Her mind, mayhap, goes back to her happy home in Denver, where she used to kneel at night and say, “Now I lay me.”
She has left her place at the restaurant, and with her partner, that “break away” creature with the yellow hair, is living in a cottage, taking their meals at the Albany.
I must tell you now what Miss Parsons wanted advice about. She had very little to do in the office, and if she would act as cashier in the restaurant at meal time, two hours morning, noon and night, Mr. Sears would allow her ten dollars a week, and her board, or twenty dollars a week, in all. From 9 to 11, and 2 to 4, she could attend to Mr. Ketchum’s correspondence. There was still another job open. They wanted an operator across the street at the Western Union from 8 P. M. until 12, when the regular night man came on to take the Chronicle press report. If she could take that, it would make her cash income twenty dollars above her board.
I asked her what she intended to do from midnight till morning. She smiled, good-naturedly, and said she thought she would have to sleep some, otherwise she would have asked for a job, folding papers.