“Well then,” says he, “it’s all right and you can go on telling me and I will tell it to the Spokesman and He will tell it to the newspaper reporters and they will tell it to the papers and the papers will tell it to the gas house district of Camden New Jersey.”
“But,” says I, “What will the missus think about it your spending so much money on a manicure girl?”
“She aint going to know about it,” he says. “I have paid cash and I dont suppose you will tell her.”
“Trust me!” I says. “But some of your friends—”
“If my friends was to see me with you now it would be easier for me to get away with it I could say you was the daughter of some famous diplomat or of a senator at the very least.” And of course that made me feel happy and just then we come to a movie parlor and he says, “We have got to learn how to wear our good clothes,” he says, “so let’s go in and see the latest thing in Hollywood manners.”
So in we go and there is a picture oh Mom the loveliest story about a poor miners’ daughter in the hills that is kidnapped by a moonshiner that is an old-fashioned name for a boot-legger and she is rescued by the handsome young son of the mine-owner that happens to be visiting the mine and he comes to love her in the end and they get married in the loveliest palace all white with sunshine and roses. And if I had of saw that yesterday I would of said it was too good to be true but now it all seemed like it was me and I felt such thrills running over me and I felt so warm and I whispered to Mr. Edgerton to thank him several times and I felt just like he really was my father like he said.
But then I got scared because of course he aint my father but he’s a man that aint happy with his wife and I am a girl that is promised to be married some day a long ways off to a poor but honest shipping-clerk in Camden New Jersey. And so I have got to keep telling myself that my job with Mr. Edgerton is to educate him so that he can educate the Spokesman that is the greatest Man in the whole world and has the job of educating the greatest people in the whole world.
But oh Mom it is hard to be a girl and to be young and to love pretty things and never to be able to have none unless you go without your lunch every day for a month or two. I go up to that little box of a room that I live in, and fry myself a frankfurter or some hamburger on a tiny oil stove and gee I get sorry for myself and I get sorry for poor Walter that thinks I am going to marry him some day and I am of course but oh Mom us plain people do have to pay a lot for what we learn!
Well we went into a restaurant and as soon as Mr Edgerton had ordered some dinner I says real determined, “We have got to get down to business now because I will not feel happy unless I give you some real good ideas to pay for all this money you have spent.” So he says that the Spokesman likes my ideas about the Reds and how to hold them down, but He thinks that just now it would be better not to hammer them too hard because this country has got a lot of machinery and things that it has got to sell and them Bolshivikis has got a lot of gold and crown jewels that they want to exchange for ten thousand tractors that is made by a friend of the Spokesman that helped him a lot to get elected.
“Gee,” I says, “I thought them Roossian fellers had got all them gold and jewels by stealing them!”