"In here, sister, where we can talk business alone."
She followed him back through the glazed door, through an outer office arranged like a school-room with aisle-forming desks, and white-shirt-waisted girls and men clerks with green eye-shades bent double over typewriters and books as big as the marble tablets on which are writ the debit and credit of all men for all time.
Boys scurried and darted; telephone bells jangled; and finally the quiet of an inner office, shut off from the noises like a padded cell, almost entirely carpeted in a leopard's skin and hung with colored lithographs of many season's comedy queens, whose dynasties were sprung from caprice and whose papier-mâché thrones had long since slumped to pulp.
"Now sit here, sister—here in this chair next to my desk, where I can look at you. Gad, ain't you grown to be a big girl, though!"
"I'm ready for that job now, Mr.—Mr. Myers."
"Well—well—well!"
Mr. Myers swung on his swivel-chair, squinted his eyes further back into his head, and nodded further appraisal and approval.
"Big little girl—can I call you that, Queenie? How have you been?"
"I've had a hard time of it, Mr.—"
"Hold out your hand and lemme tell your fortune, sister."