“Well, I’d dreamed of seeing you land high as a writer or something like that. I’ll hand you this right now: women can’t know too much these days. It’s a big advantage to a woman to know how to talk to men; I don’t mean the pool room boys but the real men—the men who draw the large mazuma. They have the brains themselves and they respect the same ingredient in girls, a lot of silly ideas to the contrary notwithstanding. Just by knowing Thackeray I’m the assistant manager of the ready-to-wear department of this spacious emporium—the youngest assistant in the house. Funny, but it’s true!”
Asked for an elucidation of the statement, Irene explained that the general superintendent of Shipley’s, who had power of life and death over everything pertaining to the establishment, was Thackeray-mad. Learning this she had carelessly referred to “Becky Sharp” in a chance conversation with him in the elevator on a day when he deigned to notice her. In a week she had been called to his office and promoted.
“Oh, don’t imagine he was leading up to anything; he’s a gentleman with a wife and three children and teaches a Sunday-school class. But he yearns to talk to some one—any one who has a scrap of interest in Thackeray. His wife invited me to their house for Sunday dinner awhile back and I was never so bored in my life. But I did manage to show an intelligent interest in his library, so I guess I’ll hold my job.”
Irene had finished at the high school two years before Grace, but the difference in their ages was not to be calculated in years. Irene had always seemed to Grace to be endowed with the wisdom of all the centuries.
“About those correspondence courses, Grace,” Irene was saying, “I’ve had most of the stuff on the schedule of that English course I wrote you about. I wouldn’t read Carlyle’s ‘Heroes and Hero-worship’ again for a farm in Texas.”
“Or Bacon’s ‘Novum Organum’,” groaned Grace.
“Well—I’m concentrating on French. You know I had French in high school, and I’m keeping it up in the hope the house will send me to Paris next year. You know Shipley’s is one of the most progressive houses in the whole west; they certainly do treat you white.”
“Mother’s not wildly enthusiastic about my going into a store. You know mother; she thinks——”
“I know,” Irene caught her up, “she thinks it’s not as respectable as working in an office or teaching a kindergarten. I met Ethel on the street the other day and she told me she’d taken a place with an insurance firm. That’s all right for Ethel but no good for you. I looked over the office game before I decided to come here and there’s nothing to it, my dear. You can make a good thing of this if you have selling talent. My salary is nothing to speak of but I get a bonus—I drew seventy-five dollars last week and I expect to hit the hundred mark before Christmas. They steer the customers who look like real money to me. When you’ve learned the trick you can make them think it’s a disgrace not to buy the highest priced thing we carry. The women from the country towns whose husbands have grabbed the water power on ’Possum creek or foreclosed on ninety per cent of the farmers in the township, bring said husbands along and they are the easiest. I throw the wrap or whatever it is on my own stately person, then clap it on the wife and hubby doesn’t dare let his wife suspect he doesn’t think her as much of a Venus de Milo as I am! A modest little violet!”
“Oh, Irene!” cried Grace, enchanted with her friend’s wisdom.