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Newspaper Page Text
Pr3S33S8!$53! mine, lit a cigar, took a puff or two, and said, "I think you'll just about suit me, little girl. I've been looking for something slick like you. I could see you were a live wjre the minute you crossed the line." "'- All this time he was putting on the 180-pound goo-goo for all he was worth and I was edging my chair away from him as I asked: "How much does the position pay?" "Five dollars to begin," he an swered. "I can't live on that," I said. "No, of course not! Nobody expects you to!" he said, and then he reached over and took my hand. "A good looking girl like doesn't have to live on $5. Why you might get as much as $18 a, week if we hit it off togeth er. ThaVs what my former stenog rapher got" The man was so obnoxious, he was so physically pressing, that I didn't think I could stand it another min ute. I wanted to slap his nasty face, not so much for myself as for the YOUNGER girls who had been there and who would go there in answer to that advertisement and who would not know the breed as well as I do. My Irish temper was rising. I knew I'd hit him in another minute. Next I tried two department stores. "No vacancies." I tried the movie houses. "All positions filled." At the end of three days I had asked for work at every blessed thing I could do and lots of things I couldn't do. And everywhere I had been turned down. "Suppose," I said to myself, "I.real ly was a YOUNG GIRL ALONE in this terrible city, what would I do? Would I, at the end of a long, dis heartening search, have the strength and the will to turn aside from sloth ful promise of the occupation always open always clamoring for re cruits?" How should I turn from the call of luxury in New York shops, the prom ise of luxury in men's eyes? As a worker the city had rejected me, but would it reject me as something else? In my three "days' journey about the city I had received too many winks and leers, repelled too many invitations in the form, "May I walk alongwith you, dearie?" "Come have a bite of lunch," etc., to believe that for a moment. la!'?'' 'alv Jta. darah Christopher "Chivalrous gentlemen suggested to me that they could pay me only $5 a week salary, but that it would be -easy for a good-looking girl like me to make $15 a week 'on the side.' " o o Washington. President Wilson has ten tons, of coal in his cellar, but the dealer can't collect the bill be cause the government refuses to O. K. it without a contract. O tammaUUMmtiaiititiiltii