"Well," asked Terry, "what did he say?"
"What did he say? He flew off the handle and shouted out: 'There's one thing sure: I'll never have you type another letter!' Just that way, as if I was nothing but an old errand boy! And after I had just done over his old letter for him six times, too!" Aggrieved and injured, Ellen appealed to her father: "Say, Dad, what do you know about that?"
Jamie O'Brien slowly cleared his throat. "Is that the way they teach you at the Business College to talk to your employer?"
The reproof in Jamie's words was entirely lost upon Ellen. She tossed her head scornfully. "Oh, us girls are on to his kind all right! We give it to them straight from the shoulder! That's the only way to treat 'em—the fussy old women! Then they respect you!"
"Ellen, Ellen, Ellen," Mrs. O'Brien wailed forlornly, "what makes you talk that way?"
Terence drew Ellen back to her story: "Well, Sis, after that, what did you say and what did he say?"
Ellen's ill humour was fast disappearing. Under the magic of her own recital, she was beginning to see herself in a new and flattering light. Instead of the inefficient stenographer who, a few moments before, had sought to hide her discomfiture in a bluster of abuse, she was now a poor deserving working-girl who had been put upon by an unscrupulous employer. Conscious of her own worth and made courageous by that consciousness, she had been able, it now seemed to her, to hold her own in a manner which must excite the admiration of her family.
"Well, when he used such language to me, I saw all right what kind of a man he was and I just gave it to him straight. 'I see what you're after,' I says to him. 'You think you're going to bounce me before my week's up and you think I'm so meek that I'll leave without saying a word! But I just won't!' I says to him. 'You hired me for a week and if you think you can throw me out without paying me a week's salary, you're mighty mistaken! I've got a father,' I says to him, 'and he'll make it hot for you!'"
Upon Mrs. O'Brien at least the effect of the story was almost terrifying. "Ellen, Ellen," she wailed, "what makes you talk so? You didn't really say that to the gentleman, did you?"
"I didn't, eh?" Ellen tossed her head defiantly. "You just bet I did!"