“Well, I didn’t do that, because they might send me any place, and I sort of wanted to work on this particular lot.” Instantly he saw himself saving Beulah Baxter, for the next installment, from a fate worse than death, but the one-time Spanish girl did not share this vision.
“Oh, well, little I care where I work. I had two days at the Bigart in a hop-joint scene, and one over at the United doin’ some board-walk stuff. I could ‘a’ had another day there, but the director said I wasn’t just the type for a chick bathing-suit. He was very nice about it. Of course I know my legs ain’t the best part of me—I sure ain’t one of them like the girl that says she’s wasted in skirts.” She grinned ruefully.
He felt that some expression of sympathy would be graceful here, yet he divined that it must be very discreetly, almost delicately, worded. He could easily be too blunt.
“I guess I’d be pretty skinny in a bathing-suit myself, right now. I know they won’t be giving me any such part pretty soon if I have to cut down on the meals the way I been doing.”
“Oh, of course I don’t mean I’m actually skinny—”
He felt he had been blunt, after all.
“Not to say skinny.” she went on, “but—well, you know—more like home-folks, I guess. Anyway, I got no future as a bathing beauty—none whatever. And this walkin’ around to the different lots ain’t helpin’ me any, either. Of course it ain’t as if I couldn’t go back to the insurance office. Mr. Gropp, he’s office manager, he was very nice about it. He says, ‘I wish you all the luck in the world, girlie, and remember your job as filin’ clerk will always be here for you.’ Wasn’t that gentlemanly of him? Still, I’d rather act than stand on my feet all day filing letters. I won’t go back till I have to.”
“Me either,” said Merton Gill, struggling against the obsession of Saturday-night dinner at Gashwiler’s.
Grimly he resumed his seat when the girl with a friendly “So long!” had trudged on. In spite of himself he found something base in his nature picturing his return to the emporium and to the thrice-daily encounter with Metta Judson’s cookery. He let his lower instincts toy with the unworthy vision. Gashwiler would advance him the money to return, and the job would be there. Probably Spencer Grant had before this tired of the work and gone into insurance or some other line, and probably Gashwiler would be only too glad to have the wanderer back. He would get off No. 3 just in time for breakfast.
He brushed the monstrous scene from his eyes, shrugged it from his shoulders. He would not give up. They had all struggled and sacrificed, and why should he shrink from the common ordeal? But he wished the Spanish girl hadn’t talked about going back to her job. He regretted not having stopped her with words of confident cheer that would have stiffened his own resolution. He could see her far down the street, on her way to the next lot, her narrow shoulders switching from light to shadow as she trudged under the line of eucalyptus trees. He hoped she wouldn’t give up. No one should ever give up—least of all Merton Gill.