A few weeks! I intended to go to work at once. I had a hundred dollars to pay back. Already I had used five of it. If I stayed here a few weeks without working, it would rapidly disappear. Then, even when I did get a position, suppose they gave me only a beginner's salary, how could I do more than pay my board from that? The possibility of getting that hundred dollars together again would then be remote, remote. And if I could not get it, how, then, was I to see him again?
I would stick to my first resolve. I would not write to him until I could send him back that money—that dirty money. I felt that it stood between us like a ghost.
I wonder if many girls suffer from this passionate sensitiveness about money. Or was I exceptional? He has said so, and yet I wonder.
I was determined to get work at once. I would learn and practise type-writing at night, but I would not wait till I had learned it, but look for work just the same through the day. Secretly I thought to myself that if Estelle took three weeks in which to learn the type-writer, as she said she did, I could learn it in two days. That may sound conceited, but you do not know Estelle. I take that back. I misjudged Estelle. Ignorant and slangy she may have been, but she was sharp-witted, quick about everything, and so cheerful and good-humored that I do not wonder she was able to keep her position for four or five years. In fact, for the kind of house she was in—a clothing firm—she was even an asset, for she "jollied" the customers and at times even took the place of a model. She said she was "a perfect thirty-six, a Veenis de Mylo."
Conceit carries youth far, and if I had not had that confidence in myself, I should not have been able to do what I did.
All next day I tramped the streets of Chicago, answering advertisements for "experienced" (mark that!) stenographers and type-writers. I was determined never to be a "beginner." I would make a bluff at taking a position, and just as I had made good with Mr. Campbell, so I felt I should make good in any position I might take. I could not afford to waste my time in small positions, and I argued that I would probably lose them as easily as the better positions. So I might as well start at the top.