The man was beginning to lose his temper. By an effort he retained it.
“The men seem fairly well satisfied; at least I have heard no complaint,” he said. “What would you suggest in the way of changes?”
As she answered, the visitor ticked off the items of her mental inventory of essentials on her fingers.
“Well, to begin with we must clear all this litter out of here,” she said. “Then we must install some really comfortable chairs and at least two or three roomy sofas and some simple couches where the men may lie down. I should also like to see a piano here. That, with the addition of some curtains at the windows and some simple treatment of the walls and a few appropriate pictures properly spaced and properly hung, will be different, I think.”
“Yes,” demurred the manager, “but admitting that we could get the things you have enumerated up here, another problem would arise: This room, which, as you see, is not large, would be so crowded with the furnishings that there would be room in it for very many less men than usually come here. There are probably fifty men in it now. If it were filled up with sofas and couches and a piano I doubt whether we could crowd twenty men inside of it.”
“Very well, then,” stated the lady decorator calmly, “you must admit only twenty men at a time.”
“Quite so; but how,” he demanded—“how am I going to select the twenty?”
The young woman considered the question for a moment. Then a solution came to her.
“I should select the twenty neatest ones,” she said.
Whereupon the manager excused himself and went out to frame a dispatch to headquarters embodying an ultimatum, which ultimatum was that the lady decorator went away from there forthwith or his resignation must take effect, coincident with his immediate departure from his present post. The home office must have called the lady off, because when I saw him he was still in harness, and swinging a man-size job in a competent way.