“That is a great deal better than nothing,” she said firmly. “We have a few savings that will keep us going till I can get a start. And perhaps I may learn the business fairly quickly.”
“You bet your life you will,” said the proprietor of the store inaudibly. Aloud he said, “The cloakroom for salespeople is at the other end of the second floor. If you’ll put your things there and come back here, I’ll take you to your department and introduce you to Miss Flynn.”
When Jerome Willing came back to his office he stood for a while motionless, frowning down at his desk. “Yes, of course it was preposterous,” he told himself. He’d known her less than half an hour—all the same he’d backed those crazy hunches of his before—it had paid him to play his hunches! And if something like that did pan out … he fell once more into a reverie. She was just the kind of woman he was looking for, mature, with a local following, somebody the women of the town trusted. He could hear their voices plain, “Ask Mrs. Knapp to step here a minute, won’t you please? She has such good taste, I’d trust her judgment. …” And she’d be tied up so tight with a sick husband and family of children there’d be no chance of someone snatching her away and marrying her just after he’d taught her the job. It would be fun to teach somebody who wanted to learn. Creative work—it always came back to that if you were going to do anything first-rate. You took raw material and shaped it with your own intelligence. If only she might be the raw material! If she turned out to have only a little capacity to study and get information out of books as well as the character and personality he was pretty sure she had. Wilder dreams had come true. His thoughts ran on again to the future of the store … with a competent manager keeping the wheels and cogs running smoothly … with him to do the buying … small lots at a time … every fortnight … quick sales … rapid turnovers that made low profits possible. With Nell handling the advertising campaign as only an intelligent college woman could, with just the right adaptation of those smart modern methods of hers to this particular small town they were serving. She was a first-rater, Nell was! It always had been fun to work with her even before they were married! And what a lark to work with her now! Good thing for Nell too! It had been asking a great deal of a real, sure-enough businesswoman like Nell to give it all up for Kinder, Küche, and Kirche. Nell had been willing, had been happy, had loved having the babies, had made them all happy. But now the children were both going to school it stood to reason she’d find time hang heavy on her hands, whipstitch that she was! And life in a small town was Hades if you didn’t have lots of work to do in spite of the big lawns and comfortable roomy homes. As far as that went, life anywhere was Hades if you didn’t have a job your size. You could see Nell had thought of all that (though she had been too good a sport to speak of it) by the way she had grabbed at this chance to get back into the old work, the work she’d loved so, and done so well at Burnham’s. Now if this Mrs. Knapp would only come through!
He brought himself up short again. … What a kid he was to let his imagination reel it off like this—but a minute later he was thinking how he and Nell would enjoy giving an apt pupil steers, showing her how to use a microscope in fabric tests, how to know the right points of a well-made garment, how to handle her girls as she got along to executive work. … Oh, well, probably it was only a pipe dream—and he knew enough to keep it to himself.
The clock in the National Bank opposite began striking. Jerome glanced at it and saw with astonishment that the hands pointed to twelve o’clock. Time to go home to lunch. As he got his hat and coat, he was wondering whether he had wasted a forenoon or whether perhaps on the contrary. …
IX
Mrs. Willing was as much interested as her husband in the arrival of Mrs. Knapp in the store. When he had finished telling her about the interview and they had laughed and wondered over the acuteness of the novice’s criticism of McCarthy’s window-dressing, Nell said reflectively: “Do you know, from all I’ve heard about her from the St. Peter’s women—I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. …”
Jerome recognized the idea to which his wife’s imagination, like his own, had leaped, but he did not think it at all necessary to let Nell know that the same possibility had occurred to him.
He shook his head disapprovingly. “No, nothing doing,” he said. “Anybody that’s got so much pep to begin with, they’re always hard to handle. Want to boss everything.”
He was pleased to have his wife point out what had already occurred to him, the stranglehold which their relative economic situations gave them over Mrs. Knapp. “I don’t believe she’d ever be hard to handle or want more than you wanted to give her—with all those reasons at home for holding onto a job,” said Nell. She had as good a business head as Jerome, however, felt as well as he how visionary it was to build even the slightest hopes on so slight a foundation, and now contributed her own share of cold water to the prudent lowering of their expectations. “But a woman with no experience of business! Women who have spent fifteen or twenty years housekeeping are no good for anything else.”
“I forgot to
