"Just look at that mob," said Bill; "lots of them are working on about one-half what they're worth, and they've been years getting in where they are. Take the young men you see, they've been specializing for years, some of them, and draw about fifteen dollars a week now—just what I do. Their chances are away ahead of mine, as a rule, because some day they'll be salesmen or managers or something—and they're in very little danger of being fired. Do you think for a minute I could step out of here into their boots and get fifteen dollars. No, sir."
"Why stick to clerical work then?" asked Evan, repeating a question that had often been ineffectively put to him.
"What else can I do?"
Evan opened his mouth to advise, but closed it again in thought; and the longer he thought the more thoughtful he became. Bill was right, what could he do? He might dig drains, but where would that lead him? Downward, certainly. Still, there must be positions in so large a city as Toronto, for men who could fill them. He expressed himself to that effect.
"The trouble is to find them," said Bill. "When a fellow works from eight in the morning until ten or eleven at night, and usually on Sunday, what chance has he to look around? I'm never out of here till six o'clock, at the earliest. You can't run across a job through the night, you know. We don't even get out for lunch."
"You don't!"
"No; we eat those ten-cent stomach-aches handed around in carts. Occasionally we get a cockroach, to relieve the monotony; but not often. Usually it's just common flies. Sometimes I have such pains in my interior I have to double up on a stool and pray for relief."
Evan smiled wanly. Bill was a reckless talker, but he generally managed to say something sensible every two or three sentences.
"How about stenography, Bill?"
"That's all right for a fellow of eighteen or nineteen, Evan, who can afford to start in at ten dollars a week. But when a fellow of twenty-three applies for a job like that they think there is something wrong with him, and some kid of seventeen, fresh from business college, steps in ahead of him.... By the way, why don't you quit?"