This new-born ambition told her to keep herself aloof from other working girls. Not that she had any inclination to associate with them; they offended her,--not only those in the office but the giggling, simpering girls she saw on the street, who were obviously of the same class, teetering along on ridiculously high heels, wearing imitation furs, and building their hair into enormous bulging pompadours. They were the kind who did not leave the offices where they worked at the noon hour but gathered in groups to eat their lunches out of cardboard boxes and left a litter of crumbs on the floor; they were the kind who crowded Childs’ restaurant, adding their shrill voices and shrieks to the deafening clatter of banging crockery.
Jeannette, feeling that it was a working girl’s privilege to become an habitué of Childs’, eagerly entered one of these restaurants at a noon hour during the early days of her employment. Accustomed as she had become to the din of an office, the noise in the eating place did not distress her. But she shrank from rubbing elbows with neighbors whose manner of feeding themselves horrified her. A study of the price card and an estimate of what she could buy for fifteen cents, the amount she decided she might properly allow herself for lunches, completed her dissatisfaction with the restaurant and similar places. She decided to go without lunch and to spend the leisure time of her noon-hour wandering up and down Fifth Avenue and Broadway, looking into shop windows,--- Lord & Taylor’s, Arnold Constable’s and even Tiffany’s on Union Square,--and in making tours of inspection through the aisles of Siegel-Cooper’s mammoth establishment on Sixth Avenue.
It was in the rotunda of this gigantic store, where stood a great golden symbolic figure of a laurel-crowned woman, that there was a large circular candy counter and soda fountain, and here the girl discovered one might get coffee, creamed and sugared, and served in a neat little flowered china cup, and two saltine crackers on the edge of the saucer, for a nickel. In time, this came to constitute her daily lunch. She could stand at the counter, sipping her drink, and nibbling the crackers at her ease, feeling inconspicuous and comfortable, presenting, she realized, merely the appearance of a lady shopper, who had taken a moment from her purchasing for a bit of refreshment.