“Thousands.”
“I should find one enough. If it is a fair question, what does your professor pay you?”
“Thirty shillings a week. In his own way he is as poor as I am.”
“And do you mean to tell me that you can live in those nice rooms you took me to, and dress decently on that sum?”
“I do, as a matter of fact; but I have a small pension, and I earn a little by writing titbits of scientific gossip for ‘The Firefly.’ Herr von Eulenberg helps. He translates interesting paragraphs from the foreign technical papers, and I jot them down, and by that means I pick up sufficient to buy an extra hat or wrap, and go to a theater or a concert. But I have to be careful, as my employer is absent each summer for two months. He goes abroad to hunt new specimens, and of course I am not paid then.”
“Is he away now?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you pass your time?”
“I write a good deal. Some day I hope to get a story accepted by one of the magazines; but it is so hard for a beginner to find an opening.”
“Yet when I offered to give you a start in the chorus of the best theater in London,—a thing, mind you, that thousands of girls are aching for,—you refused.”