Alice dragged her chair nearer to mine and looked eagerly into my face.
“Tell me,” she asked breathlessly. “What do you plan to do? What is the very first thing you plan to do when you step behind the curtain of now?”
“Get Mr. Shakespeare and Lord Bacon in a corner and make the old codgers tell me who really did write the plays.”
Unable to keep my face straight a moment longer I hurried across the hall and turned on the water in the bathtub. Returning to the room a few minutes later it was evident from the prim set of Alice’s lips that she had decided to overlook my levity. What had come over the girl?—I wondered. Why had she suddenly become such a killjoy?
“You haven’t asked me about my salary,” she said, almost as though in reply to my questions. “This was pay-day.”
“How much did you get?” My eagerness was not assumed. “You will remember my telling you that you’d get a good salary. How much?”
“What?” The next instant it dawned on me that she was jesting. “Oh, I see! Eight dollars a day. Do they pay you forty-eight or fifty-six a week?”
There was a pause, then she glanced up at me with a little twisted smile.
“Eight dollars a week.” Answering my continued speechless stare she added: “All the other girls got seven—I saw their envelopes. Some of them have been working there more than a year. Evidently,” she said bitterly, “that one dollar is a concession to my college degree.”
Taking my seat on the foot of the bed I stared through the window at the torch flaming on the top of the Metropolitan tower. Eight hours a day, six days a week—they did not even give Saturday afternoon. Eight dollars a week minus sixty cents car-fare—twelve cents the hour. And in a publishing house of international reputation!
At this thought I burst out laughing. Alice stared.
“Those are the kind of publishers dear kind Mr. Hezekiah Butterworth used to caution me against,” I explained. “It was just after the publication of my first novel—a ‘best seller,’ as you may recall. When I used to grow enthusiastic about my publishers, Mr. Butterworth would remind me: ‘Don’t forget, my dear, Judas Iscariot was a publisher.’”
But even the silliness of this hoary joke did not make Alice forget her disappointment. Watching her as she sat silent and woebegone in the meagre light of the bare little room I congratulated myself on having induced her to join me. What a mine of material she would furnish me! Polly Preston working in New York at twelve cents an hour, half-fed, going without clothes, perhaps walking ten miles a day to save car-fare. With such a background there could be no doubt about my making an intensely emotional story. Of course, I reasoned to myself, out of the abundance of my salary I would see to it that Alice did not actually suffer.