KATHARINE ANTHONY
It was in a small restaurant in the downtown business district. The girl who came in and sat down opposite me at the "table for ladies" was clearly "office help." She could not have been more than sixteen, and in the boyish-looking brown velvet hat that she wore she appeared scarcely that. Her manner had little of the self-assertiveness so commonly seen in the young girl wage-earner.
"How much is the veg'tubble soup?" she asked the waiter in a confiding tone.
"Ten cents," he said.
The price appeared satisfactory and the waiter went away with his very brief order. While the young girl waited, she caught my eye.
"It's cold today," she remarked, with a winning smile and an air of taking me into her confidence as she had done with the waiter.
"A bit chilly, yes."
"He don't let me down to dinner till so late," she continued, "sometimes half-past one. You get hungry, and then you get over being hungry, and then you don't want nothing when you do go down. You know?"
Yes, I recognized the experience.
"The office where I used to work, we went out to dinner right at twelve every day."