CHAPTER V
Mabel, hunting for Miss Gere in the big newspaper building, nearly died of fright. Some repairs were being made, and the office force was huddled into a space about half large enough for it up on the fourth floor. When Mabel finally reached the room, she was told that Miss Gere was out but that she might wait at her desk. The desk was a small, disorderly table littered with papers swarming over, around and under a battered typewriter. She sat down and looked about. Young men, unattractive, harried looking young men with steely eyes hurried in, dropped down before tables just like Miss Gere's, pounded furiously on typewriters, or consulted earnestly with a tall, thin man in shirt sleeves, who glared ferociously at their papers from the safe shadow of his green eye-shade. To Mabel, watching with all her might, this tall thin man seemed to be the only one who was not in a hurry. He listened to everyone, sometimes to three or four at a time, answered questions, sent instructions down a telephone that Mabel rightly guessed connected with the printing rooms far below and seemed perfectly capable, as indeed he was, of keeping a thousand different lines of action going at once. Mabel wondered who he was.
He was the City Editor, and already he knew about Mabel and had judged her with one of the lightning glances hidden under the shade. The room was overheated, and Mabel, waiting as patiently as she could, commenced to grow drowsy. In a half dream, she saw herself entering the magic railing which surrounded the tall man's desk. She did not lean hectically over the rail and talk rapidly from the outside as did the young men reporters. No, Mabel, grown tall and slender and surpassingly beautiful, walked into the charmed circle, greeting her chief with a slow, faint smile. Then opening her hand-bag, and drawing off her gloves while she lazily watched the great man through her long drooping lashes, she proceeded to present a sheaf of papers written over closely in her fine neat hand. The lines of her beautiful rajah silk sport suit clung to her lovely figure as she modestly drew the chief's attention to some particular statement. Stubby Mabel, in her plain, serviceable school dress, sitting unnoticed at Miss Gere's table, was thrilled at the sight of herself! As the dream-Mabel finished her interview with the City Editor and rose, she said in response to his enthusiastic praise of her work, "Thanks so much!"
The real Mabel was frozen with horror to hear herself actually speak the words! For a moment she assured herself that she had imagined that too, but a wild-looking, oldish man banging furiously on the typewriter on the next table turned and stared at her and said, "Huh?" in an absent-minded way.
"Nothing, sir," said Mabel in a flustered voice, not at all the voice of the dream-Mabel who had wholly disappeared. The real Mabel sat very still and red until Miss Gere came in.
Miss Gere was not at all what Mabel thought a Society Editor should be. The lady slouched in, a fedora hat pulled low over her eyes giving her very much the general appearance of the City Editor. A long, full ulster hung uncertainly from her thin shoulders, and its deep pockets bulged with scrap paper. Her beautiful, delicate hands were quite grubby on the knuckles. When she entered, she smiled a brilliant, transforming smile that seemed to embrace everyone in the room. All the hurried young men felt it and beamed in return; the City Editor turned his green eye-shade in her direction, and the frantic typist beside Mabel stopped long enough to flap a thin paw in her direction.
She threaded her way slowly across the room, shaking her head as Mabel rose and offered her the chair she was occupying, and sat down in another. She pushed back her hat.
"You are prompt," she said. "I didn't expect you would come today, though your mother said you would. She says you are very anxious for a newspaper career. Well, you must be willing to do a good deal of hard work." She turned first one and then the other grubby hand over and studied her perfectly kept nails. Mabel, fascinated, watched her every movement.
"I told your mother it was dollars to doughnuts that you wouldn't stick it out a month, but she seems to think you will. Of course if you have actually gone to the length of leaving home and all that, why, you must be in earnest. Do you know anything at all about reporting?"