The Wall Street Girl. Bartlett Frederick Orin
figures recalled a vivid episode.
“Ten thousand a year,” he repeated after her. “Is that what he draws?”
“That’s what they say. Anyway, he’s worth it.”
“And you think I–I might make a job like that?”
“I’ll bet I’d try for it if I were in your boots,” she answered earnestly.
“I’ll bet you’d land it if you were in my boots.” He raised his coffee-cup. “Here’s to the ten thousand a year,” he drank.
Miss Winthrop rose. She had talked more than she intended, and was somewhat irritated at herself. If, for a second, she thought she had accomplished something, she did not think so now, as he too rose and smiled at her. He handed her the pasteboard box.
“Your two dollars is in there,” he explained.
She looked perplexed.
“Shall I wait five minutes?”
“Yes,” she answered, as he thrust the box into her hands.
That box worried her all the afternoon. Not having a chance to open it, she hid it beneath her desk, where it distracted her thoughts until evening. Of course she could not open it on the Elevated, so it lay in her lap, still further to distract her thoughts on the way home. It seemed certain that a two-dollar bill could not occupy all that space.
She did not wait even to remove her hat before opening it in her room. She found a little envelope containing her two-dollar bill nestling in five dollars’ worth of roses.
It was about as foolish a thing as she had ever known a man to do.
She placed the flowers on the table when she had her supper. All night long they filled the room with their fragrance.
CHAPTER VIII
A MAN OF AFFAIRS
When, with some eighteen dollars in his pocket, Don on Sunday ordered Nora to prepare for him on that day and during the following week a breakfast of toast, eggs, and coffee, he felt very much a man of affairs. He was paying for his own sustenance, and with the first money he had ever earned. He drew from his pocket a ten-dollar bill, a five-dollar bill, a two-dollar bill, and some loose change.
“Pick out what you need,” he ordered, as he held the money toward her.
“I don’t know how much it will be, sir. I’ll ask the cook, sir.”
“Very well; ask the cook. About dinners–I think I’d better wait until I see how I’m coming out. Dinners don’t matter so much, any way, because they come after I’m through work.”
Don ate his breakfast in the dining-room before the open fire, as his father used to do. In smoking-jacket and slippered feet, he enjoyed this as a rare luxury–even this matter of breakfasting at home, which until now had been merely a negative detail of routine.
When he had finished he drew his chair closer to the flames and lighted a cigarette. He had been cutting down on cigarettes. He had always bought them by the hundred; he was now buying them by the box. Until this week he never realized that they represented money. He was paying now twenty-five cents for a box of ten; and twenty-five cents, as he had learned in the restaurant in the alley, was a sum of money with tremendous possibilities. It would buy, for one thing, five egg sandwiches; and five egg sandwiches would keep a man from being uncomfortably hungry a good many hours.
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