The first one—a slip of a girl of some sixty-seven to the nth-power summers and as many winters—betrayed her lack of typistical experience by mistaking a national cash register for a typewriter. Then she confided in us the little confidence that she really knew nothing about typewriting as yet, but that, in the sweet long ago, in the days of auld lang syne, she used to drum quite a lot on the piano, and, consequently, she imagined that typewriting, being a sort of mere finger play, would come so easy to her that she would have little difficulty in acquiring the necessary aptitude on a typewriter to qualify for the position.
The next applicant was a tall, slight, sinuous, willowy, sylph-like and ethereal creature of the hippopotamus variety, who floated into our presence like a breath of old winter, made sweet summer by the mingled odor of violets, lilacs, musk and new-mown hay. I gave her a short dictation, which she took down in longhand. I asked her why she did not write shorthand. She said she did write shorthand, unless she was in a hurry. Contemplating her huge bulk, I insinuated that we should want someone a little lighter on her corns than she, as one of the desirable accomplishments in a private secretary was that she should be able to play tennis. She said that although she had never played tennis herself, still it ran in the family, because her grandchildren were expert tennis players.
When the third antique entered, the thing began to get monotonous, as Mark Twain remarked, when a mule had fallen through his tent three times in one evening. We were getting out of patience. I told the old lady at once that we did not want anyone under twenty or over thirty-five. She assured me that she was not under twenty. I told her that I had guessed as much, and asked, “How about the other limit!” She sharply retorted that she had never, in all her life, touched thirty-five. “Well,” said I, “if that be so, you must have been skidding some when you went by that numeral.”
Disappointed, and highly indignant, we called again the next day upon that manager of the employment agency. He was profoundly apologetic, and said that he happened to have waiting in another room a young lady who was exactly what we wanted. She was immediately asked into the private office, where Mrs. Maxim and I examined her. She was about twenty-five years of age, and was, as they say down in Maine, as smart as a steel trap. I gave her a dictation replete with multi-syllabic terminology, and with unusual words of difficult orthography, but she took down everything with lightning speed, read back her notes to perfection, and transcribed them rapidly on the typewriter without a mistake.
We asked for what salary she would be willing to come to us. The salary asked was pretty high, but we instantly agreed to pay it. The manager and the young lady exchanged glances, and both looked a bit surprised. Mrs. Maxim and I then asked if we might talk with the young lady alone for a few minutes.
After some Sherlock Holmesy talk with the young woman, Mrs. Maxim and I came to the conclusion that she was a show girl kept by the manager merely to prove that he had the goods when required, provided anyone wished to pay a sufficiently high salary, and the salary was made high enough to deter most applicants. We got it from the girl that she had several times been hired and had worked a few days for each of a number of employers, until she could find some rational excuse for breaking away and returning to the agency, the manager of which, we also learned, was her brother, and she was a partner in the business.
The incident reminded me of a story told by a friend of mine in New York who bought a beautiful and highly trained Scotch terrier of a Broadway dog vendor, thinking that after keeping the dog tied up for a week, feeding him and treating him with kindness, he could be depended upon to stay with his new master, but the moment the dog was freed he disappeared, and the next day he was again with his master, the dog vendor, ready to be resold. Some time later, a light was thrown upon the inner consciousness of my friend by reading an account in the newspapers of the arrest of the dog vendor for obtaining money under false pretenses and practicing fraud in the sale of dogs, or rather, of the dog. The canine was a sort of homing-pigeon dog, trained, like a carrier pigeon, to return from each new master as soon as freed. The buying and selling of that one dog constituted the main business of the scamp.
When our interview with the young woman was concluded, we started to leave the office in disgust, but at that moment a young woman of rather prepossessing appearance, about thirty years of age, entered the office looking for a position. She explained that her late employer having gone to Europe, she was looking for a new place.
After a critical examination, we found that she would meet our requirements very well. Then it developed that, having read in newspapers and magazines some of the accounts, highly colored by the writers of them, of how I cooked with high explosives and lighted my cigar with a stick of dynamite, and burned nitroglycerin in a lamp to light the room, she, being of a rather nervous temperament, was afraid of the prospective companionship with explosive materials.
I assured her that the accounts were misrepresentations of actual facts, and explained that we lived at a very safe distance from any explosive works, and that she would be exposed to no danger whatsoever. I finally convinced her that our home was a safe place, and although still harassed with some doubts she decided to come with us.