“I receive seventy-five cents commission,” said Kent, “and I will let you have the book for one dollar and a half; that will leave twenty-five cents for my dinner.”
“I hate to ask you to take less, sir, but I can’t pay two dollars, because I haven’t so much. But here’s the one-fifty;” and he added, as he held the book tenderly, “Katie will so like it!” When a man is really in love he can’t help telling somebody, even though it be a book-agent.
Meanwhile Grant Reynolds had been learning his first experience of work in the broad world, which has too little care for and sympathy with toilers. He soon found that selling books from house to house was no “lark,” as he had anticipated. His lips curled in disdain as he was several times addressed rudely by servants, or by women whom he knew were far below him in social position. Did so many fashionable people, then, have two methods of action—one for the rich and the other for the poor?
As he was thus musing, he opened a gate and walked up to a beautiful mansion, Elizabethan in style, that one would imagine to have been just transported from England, with its ivies and great beds of roses. He stopped suddenly, for just before him a fair-haired girl, in simple blue, with broad sun-hat wreathed with daisies, was clipping a bunch of deep-red roses. She looked up half inquiringly, as the young man approached and lifted his hat. He was not abashed—he had seen attractive girls too often for that; but her kind look had an unusual effect after the sharp refusals of the morning.
The frank face of Grant could scarcely help showing its appreciation of both girl and flower, as he said, “I am canvassing for a book: ‘The Past, Present, and Future of America.’”
Perhaps the girl did not care much for the book, but she liked the looks of the tall, manly youth before her, and in her heart admired a man who had energy and will enough to earn a living for himself. Most young men whom she had met had leaned upon their fathers; and it was seldom difficult to tell what laurels they would win in the jostle which we call life.
“May I see the book?” she asked, holding out one white hand, while the other clasped the roses.
“Can I hold the flowers while you look?” said Grant, while a satisfied expression stole about his mouth and large brown eyes.
“It is beautifully illustrated! I like pictures of people greatly. I am always wondering what they have accomplished, or will in the future.”
“Ah! then you are ambitious?”