She welcomed the fretful interruption of a customer, but the woman was only returning some article, not buying, and the transaction required the floor-walker's sanction. When the shopper had gone her way, he leaned to Jean again.
"If it's worry about holding your place after the holidays," he said, "why, you can't quit it too soon. We've watched your work, and it's all right. The forelady says you've learned the stock quicker than any green clerk she's had in a dog's age, and you know she's particular. Whoever else goes, you stick."
Jean gave a long breath of thankfulness, but she was not too happy to be practical.
"And the pay?" she asked.
"The same for the present. You're still a beginner, you know."
"It is very little. The girl who had my place left because she could not live on it, I hear."
Mr. Rose tapped his prominent teeth with a pencil.
"She said something of the kind to me," he admitted. "She was unreasonable—very. What could she expect of six dollars?"
The handsome saleswoman at the dolls' furniture counter was intoning, "Oh, Mr. Rose! Oh, Mr. Rose!" with increasing petulance, and the floor-walker sped to her, leaving his cryptic utterance unexplained. Jean asked a fellow-clerk more about her predecessor, and learned that as she lived somewhere in the Bronx, both carfare and lunches had been serious items. These, fortunately, she herself need not consider. It was half the battle to feel permanent. She could shift somehow on her present wage till promotion came.
There was, moreover, a certain compensation in feeling herself a factor in this great establishment which everybody knew who had heard of New York at all. It was a show place of the metropolis, one of the seventy times seven wonders of the New World. Its floor space was reckoned in acres, its roof housed a whole city block, its capital represented millions, its wares the habitable globe. Nothing essential to human life seemed to be lacking. There were scales for your exalted babyship's earthly advent; patent foods, healing drugs, mechanical playthings for your childish wants or ills; text-books for your growing mind; fine feathers for your expanding social wings; the trousseau for your marriage; furnishings from cellar to attic for your first housekeeping; a bank for your savings; fittings for your office; the postal service, the telegraph, the telephone, lest business suffer while you shop; bronzes, carvings, automobiles, steam yachts, old wines, old books, old masters for your topping prosperity; comforts innumerable—oculists, dentists, discreet photographers, what not—for your lean and slippered decline; and, yes, even the sad few vanities you may take with you to your quiet grave.