“Mrs. Prouty was telling me how she’s got everything organized there. They are all saying it’s just like her. Mr. Knapp is fairly comfortable now and can read, and sit up in bed, and doesn’t need constant care. There’s nothing anybody can do for him, now, poor thing! The two older children are big enough to take care of themselves and dress their little brother and help around the house. It seems that several of the people at the store are being very helpful—not salespeople or anybody in Mr. Knapp’s office but a couple of the delivery boys and one of the cleaning women. The cleaning woman, old Mrs. Hennessy, works at the store you see, before and after hours, so she can go to the Knapp house in the daytime an hour or so to do up the work. And the delivery boys take turns dropping in nights and mornings to look out for the furnace and empty ashes and do the heavy things. They stop in daytimes too as they go by to see if he wants anything. Oh, they manage, somehow.”
“How good poor people are to anybody in trouble,” remarked Jerome comfortably, pulling on his pipe and wondering for the first time if perhaps there really might be some truth in that threadbare remark which he had heard and repeated so many times and never believed a word of.
“They say Mr. Knapp was always very kind to them at the store,” said his wife, “the work people, I mean—was lovely to old Mrs. Hennessy when her grandson had to be sent to the sanatorium. And he helped one of the delivery boys out of a scrape.”
The proprietor of the store frowned and took his pipe hastily out of his mouth. “He did! Which boy I wonder? What do you suppose he’d been doing? I’d like to know more about that!” He was very much vexed at the idea that something about which he had no information had been happening at the store. It was just like that impractical, weak-kneed Knapp to shield an erring employee and interfere with discipline! He felt again a wave of the inexplicable annoyance which every contact with Knapp had caused him from the first time he ever laid eyes on the man. Helping the delivery boys to cover up their tracks, was he? Lord! what a dead loss that man was every way you looked at him. He didn’t blame Harvey Bronson for being rubbed the wrong way by him and snapping his head off. Who wouldn’t?
He remembered suddenly that the man was now a bedridden cripple, cooled down, put his pipe back in his mouth and said aloud: “Well, I wish you’d drop in to the Cloak-and-Suits after a week or so and just get an impression of her yourself.”
Miss Flynn, the veteran head saleswoman in the Cloak-and-Suits told Mrs. Willing that the new employee was a wonder, and that the way she had taken hold made them all sit up. “She’s just eating it up, Mrs. Willing, just eating it up. She’s learned her stock quicker than anybody you ever saw, as if she loved it. Now I never expect a stock-girl to know where things are inside the first week; they do well if they do. But Mrs. Knapp—every minute there wasn’t a customer on hand, would she fluff up her hair and get out her vanity box or put her head together with the other girls, turning their backs on the stairs—not much! Mr. Willing had told her the way he’s told every stock-girl we’ve tried, that the first thing to do was to learn her stock and she went to it as if ’twas to a wedding! With never a word from me, she just tore off into the stock-cabinet every chance she got. First off, she made a list of the things, the way they hung and then as she worked I could see her look at her piece of paper, her lips moving, just like a kid learning a spelling lesson. And yet for all she was so deep in that, she’d keep her eye out for customers—yes, she did! You wouldn’t believe a stock-girl would feel responsible about customers, would you, Mrs. Willing, when there’s nothing in it for her? But for a fact she’d keep poking her head out of the stock-cabinet to make sure nobody had come in; and once I saw her, when she didn’t know I was looking, spot a customer coming up the stairs, and go to stir up that lazy Margaret Donahue to get busy, and she reading a novel under the counter the sly way she does behind my back!” Miss Flynn perceived that she had wandered from the sequence of her narrative and added now, “Well, by studying her work like that, it wasn’t three days—really, I mean it, Mrs. Willing, not three days before she knew where every cloak and suit in this entire department was hung, or if it had been sold. I heard Ellen O’Hern that can’t remember a thing ask her to bring out that blue knit cape with the astrachan collar, and Mrs. Knapp say to her, in a nice quiet tone, so the customer couldn’t hear, ‘That was sold day before yesterday, don’t you remember, to Mrs. Emery,’ and go and get a blue broadcloth cape with a white wool collar that was the closest thing to the other
