Katie nodded.
"Well, say, I just this minute passed Emma Schrem, an' she says Cora Costigan is quitting her job at the Lennox store to-day to be married to-morrow. Why don't you pull up there and try for it?"
Try for it? Katie could scarcely stop to thank her rescuer before she had turned northward. There was no longer left her even the five cents necessary for carfare, and, though she was faint with hunger and shaking with fear lest her tardiness should lose her this slim opportunity, she was forced to walk. Facing a fine rain blown in from the Sound, she walked up Second Avenue, and finally, turning westward to the shopping quarter now crowded with salesgirls on their hurried way to work, she entered, by the dark employés' door, the large department-store of Joshua N. Lennox, merchant and philanthropist.
A dozen quick inquiries rushed her, wet and weary, but flushed by her walk and radiant with the excitement of the race, into the presence of the frock-coated, pale-faced, suave-mouthed Mr. Porter, the tall, thin man, with the precision of a surgeon and the gravity of a Sunday-school superintendent, to whose attention, it appeared, such pleas as hers must be brought. Mr. Porter, who had gray side-whiskers, which he stroked with white hands, listened in judicial calm to what she had to say.
"Just fill out this application-blank," he remarked as, breathless, Katie ended her little speech.
They were in a dim, bare office under the street, the man at a roll-top desk lighted by a green-shaded incandescent lamp, the girl standing beside him. Mr. Porter indicated a writing-shelf along the opposite wall, where Katie found a pile of the blanks, and pen and ink. While she struggled with the task assigned her, Mr. Porter verified, by brief, sharp inquiries through a telephone, her statement of the approaching marriage of Miss Cora Costigan.
Katie, meanwhile, was giving her age, her parentage, her birthplace, the name of the firm that had last employed her—she mentioned the candy-shop for that,—was cheerfully agreeing to join the "Employés' Mutual Benefit Association," and was putting a "Yes," which she intended promptly to forget, to the question that asked her to become a spy on her co-workers: "If you saw a fellow-employé doing anything detrimental to the interests of the firm, would you consider it your duty to report the same?" It was only at one of the last questions that she hesitated.
"Please what does that mean?" she asked.
Mr. Porter deigned to walk across the room and, close to her shoulder, examined the question. It was the simple one: "Do you live with your parents?"
"That," said Mr. Porter, "is inserted because the firm wishes to have only nice girls here, and those with good home influences are considered—most trustworthy."