Mr. Ross was the senior partner of the big manufacturing plant, and eighteen-year-old Ann admired him immensely. He was so calm, so quiet, and yet so forceful; a splendid business man, but one whose family’s wants and wishes were cared for before all else. Ann knew he must be an ideal father, for he possessed all the qualities that Ann’s own father had lacked.
Mr. Carstairs had been far from an ideal parent and had ended his selfish, careless life just as Ann was preparing to enter college. Ann and her mother had bravely gathered together what money remained, and Ann started off to a business school instead.
For three months she worked feverishly night and day, and at the end of that time, when their finances were in a precarious condition, she left the school to enter the manufacturing firm of Ross and Hayward. She had been there for nearly two years now, years of worry and careful planning to make the slender salary cover growing needs.
“We have almost proved that the necessities of life are unnecessary, so nearly have we come to getting along on next to nothing,” she had laughingly told her mother only the evening before.
But though she joked about it, the situation was becoming serious, and Ann had reached the place where she felt that she must steel herself to the point of asking for more wages.
“Do people always have to ask for an increase?” she wondered. “Everybody here treats me as if I were a child, except when it comes to giving me work. That’s a different matter.”
Ann did not as a rule complain about the amount of work she had to do. Instead, she was rather proud of being able to accomplish so much in a single day. To-night, however, she was tired and all out of sorts. She felt, too, that her looks were all against her. Curly hair and freckles, added to a diminutive figure, gave her a decidedly childlike appearance.
“I wish,” she declared to herself, “I wish I were tall and had straight hair, and wrinkles around my mouth. What chance has anyone to advance when she is short and freckled? I just must make them sit up and take notice!”
She glanced around her with a proprietary look as she spoke. Her desk and switchboard were in the outer office near the head of the short flight of stairs leading from the street door, and commanded a view of the entrance door and the stairway leading to the upper floors. At the extreme end of the room was the entrance to the stock room, and beside it the great iron door leading to the vault where the business records were kept. In the dark corner by the vault door stood two tall piles of sales books. Since the bookkeeper had turned off the extra lights, the big office was lighted only by the globe above Ann’s head. The heavy presses and machinery in the factory, running at full speed, shook the building, and their roar and clatter sounded unusually loud now that the office was quiet.
