Beauty in the Bank
Somehow we enjoy going to the bank nowadays far more than we used to. It isn't that we are more solvent than heretofore—our solvency does not seem to increase with our years—but the banks are much more interesting resorts than in the old days before the war filled them up with young ladies. The banks now have more color and animation, so to speak—especially since the girls have taken to wearing those gaudy pull-over sweaters.
We were reminded of this changed aspect of our sterner financial institutions the other day, when we caught ourself going in to have our bank-book made up for the third time in the week. Formerly it had been our custom to wait till we got a short and nasty note from the accountant asking us to call around and fix up that overdraught. But now we run right in every time we pass and have a little book-keeping done for us.
Instead of the gloomy young man who used to preside over the records of the savings department, they now have a bright young woman. This naturally introduces a very pleasing social atmosphere. We no longer chuck our bankbook in through the wicket with an air of weary nonchalance, or gaze coldly at the clerk as though daring him to make an insolent remark about the size of our balance and the amount of book-keeping it involves. Our account is still small and very lively, but we don't gaze coldly—on the contrary!
Now we take off our hat, and try to think up something sprightly to say about the weather. If it is a nice day in the summer, for instance, this leads naturally to a discussion of the best place to spend one's vacation, and whether or not one likes sailing, and does one do much dancing in the summer, and how good the roads are for motoring just now.
If it is winter or the weather is bad, it brings one at once to the tragic impossibility of going anywhere or doing anything, and how dull town is just now, and the theatre and the movies—especially the movies! This last is an opening we have found invariably successful. Once you mention Mary Pickford or Francis X. Bushman, acquaintance ripens visibly. Young ladies who turn coldly from almost any other conversational bait rise voraciously to this one, and take it hook, line, and sinker.
A great thing, too, about discussing film-favorites is that it furnishes a most useful index to character. Girls who like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, for instance, are apt to be of the merry, hoydenish sort—fond of romping, you know, and caramels and practical jokes, and all that sort of jolly rot. The admirers of Clara Kimball Young or Mr. Bushman, on the other hand, are usually of the yearning, soulful type, the kind of girl who wants you to recite poetry to her in the twilight, and longs for some strong man to protect her—this sort of thing usually leads to solitaire-diamond rings. But the young ladies who enthuse over Theda Bara and Pauline Frederick—well, when we run across one of these we always look around for help. When one meets an amateur of vamping one had best not get too far from one's strategic reserves.
This conversational gambit, is all right, but the trouble in the banks is that they keep changing the young ladies around. Just as soon as we have got things moving along nicely, and have reached the point where we can talk about the young lady's preferences in the matter of supper, or can throw out general suggestions in the direction of an evening's paddle in the Island lagoon, they remove her to an inaccessible portion of the building—perhaps they confine her in the main vault—and we have to start all over again. It is a little discouraging, even though our heart is in the work. Bank managers and chief accountants certainly seem to be jealous devils.
Business men, too, are an awful nuisance. They have a way of breaking in disastrously on our little tête-à-têtes at the wicket. One day last summer an awfully nice girl was reading a cheque we brought in, while we playfully seized her other hand which she had left carelessly within reach. Naturally she didn't notice that we were holding it—wonderful concentration these business women have! And naturally neither of us was paying much attention to anyone else—not while this particular business matter was being settled.
"Say, what is this?" a wheezy voice asked at our ear. "Is this a bank or have I butted into a manicuring parlor?"