That real estate owner was having trouble. Pat was rebellious. He sat, one big leg dangling over the side of the arm chair and Shakespeare’s Sonnets face downward on his knee, orating against the new woman.
“What do they want to come butting into the game for?” he demanded. “It’s not their place. What do they know about it anyway? The men are bad enough as it is. I’m not a holy show. This woman’s coming here to make me one. I never have stood for women around the training quarters, and I don’t care if she is a reporter.”
“But she’s not an ordinary reporter,” Stubener interposed. “You’ve heard of the Sangsters?—the millionaires?”
Pat nodded.
“Well, she’s one of them. She’s high society and all that stuff. She could be running with the Blingum crowd now if she wanted to instead of working for wages. Her old man’s worth fifty millions if he’s worth a cent.”
“Then what’s she working on a paper for?—keeping some poor devil out of a job.”
“She and the old man fell out, had a tiff or something, about the time he started to clean up San Francisco. She quit. That’s all—left home and got a job. And let me tell you one thing, Pat: she can everlastingly sling English. There isn’t a pen-pusher on the Coast can touch her when she gets going.”
Pat began to show interest, and Stubener hurried on.
“She writes poetry, too—the regular la-de-dah stuff, just like you. Only I guess hers is better, because she published a whole book of it once. And she writes up the shows. She interviews every big actor that hits this burg.”
“I’ve seen her name in the papers,” Pat commented.