The little lawyer, Mr. Matthews, had a large single room in which he sublet desk-room to a pair of young real-estaters. Georgia didn't like the looks of the place, but inasmuch as Mr. Matthews didn't haggle an instant about her salary, she took it.
She had nothing important to do. Mr. Matthews' mind was fussy and unsystematic. He had little business and set her to copying over his briefs of bygone years. "Codifying," he called it; why she never knew.
She shrewdly suspected she was engaged rather as a "front" to impress clients than to work at her trade.
Whenever a visitor, whether collector or suspender peddler, came to see Mr. Matthews, that attorney bade him sit a few minutes while he finished up a letter that had to catch the Twentieth Century or the five thirty Pennsylvania Limited, as the case might be. Then he would fake a letter and Georgia would help him at the end by inquiring, "Special delivery, I suppose, sir?"
It answered her purpose for the time being, but she hadn't the vaguest intention of staying. She saw there was no future.
Mr. Matthews each morning requested her to oblige the young real-estaters by "helping them out" with their correspondence.
"Helping them out" meant doing it all. Mr. Matthews was brimming with euphemisms. Likewise they, the real estaters, got to asking her to "help out" their friends, which she good-naturedly did—in hours.
Saturday Mr. Matthews didn't turn up, nor yet Monday. Tuesday when Georgia suggested her payment, he said he was expecting a check that afternoon. Thursday, when she insisted on it, he told her to collect half from the real-estaters, since she had been working for them as much as for him.
She couldn't see it that way at all. He had engaged her.
He fell into legal phraseology. "Qui facit per alium," or something of the sort; and she told him nettly she wasn't a fool and that if he didn't pay her immediately she would attach his furniture.