“How do you like your new position?” she asked, as turning her chair sideways to the piazza railing she put her feet on the rung of my chair.
“W-e-l-l,” I hesitated. “I don’t know whether to be amused by it or to hate it—reading the affidavits of draft-evaders. There are so many of them I feel like kicking, yet, at the same time I feel like crying—to find that there are so many persons living in our country, fattening on it, enjoying its benefits and not caring enough for it to fight for its ideals.”
“You mustn’t expect everybody to be as keen about doing their bit as you are. Your fingers are never still. You must roll bandages or knit sweaters in your sleep,” she laughed. “What are the other employees like?”
“We’re a grab-bag lot. It is just as though the Secretary of War, wishing to set going the machinery of the draft, had thrust his hand into a bag filled with a miscellaneous collection of workers, and would-be workers, and grabbed a handful. The head of the subdepartment in which I work was a saleswoman in a smallish Brooklyn shop, at eight dollars a week. Now she is getting twenty-five, and seems to look upon it as a miracle.”
“I can sympathize with her,” the librarian told me. “In the New York public library I only received forty dollars a month. Now I get eighty and the promise of a bonus at Christmas. After you’ve skimped and struggled so long to have your salary doubled in one jump does make you feel inclined to pinch yourself. But when the war is over—you don’t think salaries will go down again, do you?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out—whether wages should go still higher, remain on the present level, or fall back to the pre-war figure.” Then I outlined what I had done, and what I planned to do.
“Until after the war—go from one position to another? I never heard of such a thing!” she exclaimed. “You will never make anything, taking what employers offer you.”
“I’ll learn conditions and, incidentally, employers.”
“But you might do so much better. With your pull even though you can’t go abroad you could land something big. There’s the publicity department——”
“Allah forbid!” And even a Moslem himself could not have been more fervent.
“It is because I am a writer,” I interrupted. “Because I am a writer and intend some day to be an author.”