“Heavens! Four dollars! I couldn’t possibly have earned four dollars in about two hours. Why I could make a living at that rate, even if I worked only two hours a day. It couldn’t be worth that much!”
“Well, you know perfectly well, Mary Louise, if you were having the work done, you wouldn’t hesitate to pay twice that much,” scolded Josie. “You’ve got to put yourself in the other fellow’s place. Just pretend you need the money and charge what it would be worth to a well off young person like, say—Mrs. Danny Dexter. You have to pay us a fifteen per cent commission besides for letting you do the work. That would only leave you three dollars and forty cents.”
“Oh, what a funny Josie!” laughed Mary Louise. “You know I’m not going to take any of the money. It would be absurd when I’ve had such a good time doing the little bonnet.”
“A good workman always has a good time doing his work,” asserted Josie, who was quite like her father in getting off wise little saws. “You needn’t keep the money, but you are obliged to take it and give us sixty cents. Business is business and we want to get other business from this very same little old lady.”
“I’ll wager she doesn’t have a new bonnet more than every three years,” said Mary Louise, smiling at Josie’s firm business methods.
“Perhaps not but she has many friends, I am sure, and she will tell them and they will tell their friends and so forth and so on.”
“How do you know she has a lot of friends?” teased Elizabeth. “You didn’t see her and Irene and I haven’t told you a thing about her, not even her name.”
“Why, I could tell by her old bonnet—tell easily enough. Don’t you know one of the first things a detective studies is the psychology of clothes? My father thought more of a pair of old shoes found under the bed of a man who was supposed to have committed a murder than he did of all the mass of circumstantial evidence the other sleuths were unearthing. He had the opinion from the beginning that the wearer of those old shoes had not committed a murder, wasn’t capable of having committed that particular murder, which was one of these low down, sneaking murders. He said he might have got angry and knocked a man down and killed him that way, but a man who walked so straight without running his heels down at all and who wore out his shoe in a little round ring under the ball of his foot, evidently not trying to walk on his tip toes nor yet taking the precaution to have rubber heels to walk easy, was not a man to deliberately plan a foul, sneaking murder. He hung on to those shoes and worked up the case with that theory as a basis and, do you know, he proved the man’s innocence in the face of all kinds of damning evidence! Link by link he knocked off the chain of evidence of guilt until the man was free and the proper person indicted and imprisoned for life.”
“And did the guilty one wear rubber heels and run ’em down and wear off the toes of his shoes trying to pussyfoot?” asked Mary Louise.
“No! He wore Louis Quinze heels and got so many new shoes there was no reading character from his shoes. The fact was, he was a she and that was the reason he is serving a life sentence instead of being hanged.”