The 42nd Parallel

Janey

The trip to Mexico and the private car the Mexican government put at the disposal of J. Ward Moorehouse to go back north in was lovely but a little tiresome, and it was so dusty going across the desert. Janey bought some very pretty things so cheap, some turquoise jewelry and pink onyx to take home to Alice and her mother and sisters as presents. Going up in the private car J. Ward kept her busy dictating and there was a big bunch of men always drinking and smoking cigars and laughing at smutty stories in the smokingroom or on the observation platform. One of them was that man Barrow she’d done some work for in Washington. He always stopped to talk to her now and she didn’t like the way his eyes were when he stood over her table talking to her, still he was an interesting man and quite different from what she’d imagined a laborleader would be like, and it amused her to think that she knew about Queenie and how startled he’d be if he knew she knew. She kidded him a good deal and she thought maybe he was getting a crush on her, but he was the sort of man who’d be like that with any woman.

They didn’t have a private car after Laredo and the trip wasn’t so nice. They went straight through to New York. She had a lower in a different car from J. Ward and his friends, and in the upper berth there was a young fellow she took quite a fancy to. His name was Buck Saunders and he was from the panhandle of Texas and talked with the funniest drawl. He’d punched cows and worked in the Oklahoma oilfields and had saved up some money and was going to see Washington City. He was tickled to death when she said she was from Washington and she told him all about what he ought to see, the Capitol and the White House and the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and the Old Soldiers’ Home and Mount Vernon. She said to be sure to go out to Great Falls and told him about canoeing on the canal and how she’d been caught in a terrible thunderstorm once near Cabin John’s Bridge. They ate several meals together in the dining car and he told her she was a dandy girl and awful easy to talk to and how he had a girl in Tulsa, Ok., and how he was going to get a job in Venezuela, down at Maracaibo in the oilfields because she’d thrown him over to marry a rich dirtfarmer who struck oil in his cowpasture. G. H. Barrow kidded Janey about her fine handsome pickup and she said what about him and the redheaded lady who got off in St. Louis, and they laughed and she felt quite devilish and that G. H. Barrow wasn’t so bad after all. When Buck got off the train in Washington he gave her a snapshot of himself taken beside an oilderrick and said he’d write her every day and would come to New York to see her if she’d let him, but she never heard from him.

She liked Morton, the cockney valet, too, because he always spoke to her so respectfully. Every morning he’d come and report on how J. Ward was feeling, “’E looks pretty black this mornin’, Miss Williams,” or, “’E was whistlin’ while ’e was shavin’. Is ’e feelin’ good? Rath-er.”

When they got to the Pennsylvania Station, New York, she had to stay with Morton to see that the box of files was sent to the office at 100 Fifth Avenue and not out to Long Island where J. Ward’s home was. She saw Morton off in a Pierce Arrow that had come all the way in from Great Neck to get the baggage, and went alone to the office in a taxicab with her typewriter and the papers and files. She felt scared and excited looking out of the taxicab window at the tall white buildings and the round watertanks against the sky and the puffs of steam way up and the sidewalks crowded with people and all the taxicabs and trucks and the shine and jostle and clatter. She wondered where she’d get a room to live, and how she’d find friends and where she’d eat. It seemed terribly scary being all alone in the big city like that and she wondered that she’d had the nerve to come. She decided she’d try to find Alice a job and that they’d take an apartment together, but where would she go tonight?

When she got to the office, everything seemed natural and reassuring and so handsomely furnished and polished so bright and typewriters going so fast and much more stir and bustle than there’d been in the offices of Dreyfus and Carroll; but everybody looked Jewish and she was afraid they wouldn’t like her and afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold down the job.

A girl named Gladys Compton showed her her desk, that she said had been Miss Rosenthal’s desk. It was in a little passage just outside J. Ward’s private office opposite the door to Mr. Robbins’ office. Gladys Compton was Jewish and was Mr. Robbins’ stenographer and said what a lovely girl Miss Rosenthal had been and how sorry they all were in the office about her accident and Janey felt that she was stepping into a dead man’s shoes and would have a stiff row to hoe. Gladys Compton stared at her with resentful brown eyes that had a slight squint in them when she looked hard at anything and said she hoped she’d be able to get through the work, that sometimes the work was simply killing, and left her.

When things were closing up at five, J. Ward came out of his private office. Janey was so pleased to see him standing by her desk. He said he’d talked to Miss Compton and asked her to look out for Janey a little at first and that he knew it was hard for a young girl finding her way around a new city, finding a suitable place to live and that sort of thing, but that Miss Compton was a very nice girl and would help her out and he was sure everything would work out fine. He gave her a blueeyed smile and handed her a closely written packet of notes and said would she mind coming in the office a little early in the morning and having them all copied and on his desk by nine o’clock. He wouldn’t usually ask her to do work like that but all the typists were so stupid and everything was in confusion owing to his absence. Janey felt only too happy to do it and warm all over from his smile.

She and Gladys Compton left the office together. Gladys Compton suggested that seeing as she didn’t know the city hadn’t she better come home with her. She lived in Flatbush with her father and mother and of course it wouldn’t be what Miss Williams was accustomed to but they had a spare room that they could let her have until she could find her way around that it was clean at least and that was more than you could say about many places. They went by the station to get her bag. Janey felt relieved not to have to find her way alone in all that crowd. Then they went down into the subway and got on an expresstrain that was packed to the doors and Janey didn’t think she could stand it being packed in close with so many people. She thought she’d never get there and the trains made so much noise in the tunnel she couldn’t hear what the other girl was saying.

At last they got out into a wide street with an elevated running down it where the buildings were all one or two stories and the stores were groceries and vegetable and fruit stores. Gladys Compton said, “We eat kosher, Miss Williams, on account of the old people. I hope you don’t mind; of course Benny — Benny’s my brudder — and I haven’t any prejudices.” Janey didn’t know what kosher was but she said of course she didn’t mind and told the other girl about how funny the food was down in Mexico, so peppery you couldn’t hardly eat it.

When they got to the house Gladys Compton began to pronounce her words less precisely and was very kind and thoughtful. Her father was a little old man with glasses on the end of his nose and her mother was a fat pearshaped woman in a wig. They talked Yiddish among themselves. They did everything they could to make Janey comfortable and gave her a nice room and said they’d give her board and lodging for ten dollars a week as long as she wanted to stay and when she wanted to move she could go away and no hard feelings. The house was a yellow twofamily frame house on a long block of houses all exactly alike, but it was well heated and the bed was comfortable. The old man was a watchmaker and worked at a Fifth Avenue jeweler’s. In the old country their name had been Kompshchski but they said that in New York nobody could pronounce it. The old man had wanted to take the name of Freedman but his wife thought Compton sounded more refined. They had a good supper with tea in glasses and soup with dumplings and red caviar and gefültefisch and Janey thought it was very nice knowing people like that. The boy Benny was still in highschool, a gangling youth with heavy glasses who ate with his head hung over his plate and had a rude way of contradicting anything anybody said. Gladys said not to mind him, that he was very good in his studies and was going to study law. When the strangeness had worn off a little Janey got to like the Comptons, particularly old Mr. Compton, who was very kind and treated everything that happened with gentle heartbroken humor.

The work at the office was so interesting. J. Ward was beginning to rely on her for things. Janey felt it was going to be a good year for her.

The worst thing was the threequarters of an hour ride in the subway to Union Square mornings. Janey would try to read the paper and to keep herself in a corner away from the press of bodies. She liked to get to the office feeling bright and crisp with her dress feeling neat and her hair in nice order, but the long jolting ride fagged her out, made her feel as if she wanted to get dressed and take a bath all over again. She liked walking along Fourteenth Street all garish and shimmery in the sunny early morning dust and up Fifth Avenue to the office. She and Gladys were always among the first to get in. Janey kept flowers on her desk and would sometimes slip in and put a couple of roses in a silver vase on J. Ward’s broad mahogany desk. Then she’d sort the mail, lay his personal letters in a neat pile on the corner of the blotter-pad that was in a sort of frame of red illuminated Italian leather, read the other letters, look over his engagement book and make up a small typewritten list of engagements, interviews, copy to be got out, statements to the press. She laid the list in the middle of the blotter under a rawcopper paperweight from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, checking off with a neat W. the items she could attend to without consulting him.

By the time she was back at her desk correcting the spelling in the copy that had emanated from Mr. Robbins’ office the day before she began to feel a funny tingle inside her; soon J. Ward would be coming in. She told herself it was all nonsense but every time the outer office door opened she looked up expectantly. She began to worry a little; he might have had an accident driving in from Great Neck. Then when she’d given up expecting him he’d walk hurriedly through with a quick smile all around and the groundglass door of his private office would close behind him. Janey would notice whether he wore a dark or a light suit, what color his necktie was, whether he had a fresh haircut or not. One day he had a splatter of mud on the trouserleg of his blue serge suit and she couldn’t keep her mind off it all morning trying to think of a pretext to go in and tell him about it. Rarely he’d look at her directly with a flash of blue eyes as he passed, or stop and ask her a question. Then she’d feel fine.

The work at the office was so interesting. It put her right in the midst of headlines like when she used to talk to Jerry Burnham back at Dreyfus and Carroll’s. There was the Onondaga Salt Products account and literature about bathsalts and chemicals and the employees’ baseball team and cafeteria and old age pensions, and Marigold Copper and combating subversive tendencies among the miners who were mostly foreigners who had to be educated in the principles of Americanism, and the Citrus Center Chamber of Commerce’s campaign to educate the small investors in the North in the stable building qualities of the Florida fruit industry, and the slogan to be launched, “Put an Alligator Pear on Every Breakfast Table” for the Avocado Producers Coöperative. That concern occasionally sent up a case so that everybody in the office had an alligator pear to take home, except Mr. Robbins who wouldn’t take his, but said they tasted like soap. Now the biggest account of all was Southwestern Oil campaign to counter the insidious anti-American propaganda of the British oilcompanies in Mexico and to oppose the intervention lobby of the Hearst interests in Washington.

In June Janey went to her sister Ellen’s wedding. It was funny being in Washington again. Going on the train Janey looked forward a whole lot to seeing Alice, but when she saw her they couldn’t seem to find much to talk about. She felt out of place at her mother’s. Ellen was marrying a law student at Georgetown University who had been a lodger and the house was full of college boys and young girls after the wedding. They all laughed and giggled around and Mrs. Williams and Francie seemed to enjoy it all right, but Janey was glad when it was time for her to go down to the station and take the train to New York again. When she said goodby to Alice she didn’t say anything about her coming down to New York to get an apartment.

She felt pretty miserable on the train sitting in the stuffy parlorcar looking out at towns and fields and signboards. Getting back to the office the next morning was like getting home.

It was exciting in New York. The sinking of the Lusitania had made everybody feel that America’s going into the war was only a question of months. There were many flags up on Fifth Avenue. Janey thought a great deal about the war. She had a letter from Joe from Scotland that he’d been torpedoed on the steamer Marchioness and that they’d been ten hours in an open boat in a snowstorm off Pentland Firth with the current carrying them out to sea, but that they’d landed and he was feeling fine and that the crew had gotten bonuses and that he was making big money anyway. When she’d read the letter she went in to see J. Ward with a telegram that had just come from Colorado and told him about her brother being torpedoed and he was very much interested. He talked about being patriotic and saving civilization and the historic beauties of Rheims cathedral. He said he was ready to do his duty when the time came, and that he thought America’s entering the war was only a question of months.

A very welldressed woman came often to see J. Ward. Janey looked enviously at her lovely complexion and her neat dresses, not ostentatious but very chic, and her manicured nails and her tiny feet. One day the door swung open so that she could hear her and J. Ward talking familiarly together. “But, J.W., my darling,” she was saying, “this office is a fright. It’s the way they used to have their offices in Chicago in the early eighties.” He was laughing. “Well, Eleanor, why don’t you redecorate it for me? Only the work would have to be done without interfering with business. I can’t move, not with the press of important business just now.”

Janey felt quite indignant about it. The office was lovely the way it was, quite distinctive, everybody said so. She wondered who this woman was who was putting ideas into J. Ward’s head. Next day when she had to make out a check for two hundred and fifty dollars on account to Stoddard and Hutchins, Interior Decorators, she almost spoke her mind, but after all it was hardly her business. After that Miss Stoddard seemed to be around the office all the time. The work was done at night so that every morning when Janey came in, she found something changed. It was all being done over in black and white with curtains and upholstery of a funny claret-color. Janey didn’t like it at all but Gladys said it was in the modern style and very interesting. Mr. Robbins refused to have his private cubbyhole touched and he and J. Ward almost had words about it, but in the end he had his own way and the rumor went round that J. Ward had to increase his salary to keep him from going to another agency.

Labor Day Janey moved. She was sorry to leave the Comptons but she’d met a middleaged woman named Eliza Tingley who worked for a lawyer on the same floor as J. Ward’s office. Eliza Tingley was a Baltimorean, had passed a bar examination herself and Janey said to herself that she was a woman of the world. She and her twin brother, who was a certified accountant, had taken a floor of a house on West 23rd Street in the Chelsea district and they asked Janey to come in with them. It meant being free from the subway and Janey felt that the little walk over to Fifth Avenue every morning would do her good. The minute she’d seen Eliza Tingley in the lunchcounter downstairs she’d taken a fancy to her. Things at the Tingleys were free and easy and Janey felt at home there. Sometimes they had a drink in the evening. Eliza was a good cook and they’d take a long time over dinner and play a couple of rubbers of threehanded bridge before going to bed. Saturday night they’d almost always go to the theater. Eddy Tingley would get the seats at a cutrate agency he knew. They subscribed to The Literary Digest and to The Century and The Ladies’ Home Journal and Sundays they had roast chicken or duck and read the magazine section of The New York Times.

The Tingleys had a good many friends and they liked Janey and included her in everything and she felt that she was living the way she’d like to live. It was exciting too that winter with rumors of war all the time. They had a big map of Europe hung up on the livingroom wall and marked the positions of the Allied armies with little flags. They were heart and soul for the Allies and names like Verdun or Chemin des Dames started little shivers running down their spines. Eliza wanted to travel and made Janey tell her over and over again every detail of her trip to Mexico; they began to plan a trip abroad together when the war was over and Janey began to save money for it. When Alice wrote from Washington that maybe she would pull up stakes in Washington and go down to New York, Janey wrote saying that it was so hard for a girl to get a job in New York just at present and that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

All that fall J. Ward’s face looked white and drawn. He got in the habit of coming into the office Sunday afternoons and Janey was only too glad to run around there after dinner to help him out. They’d talk over the events of the week in the office and J. Ward would dictate a lot of private letters to her and tell her she was a treasure and leave her there typing away happily. Janey was worried too. Although new accounts came in all the time the firm wasn’t in a very good financial condition. J. Ward had made some unfortunate plunges in the Street and was having a hard time holding things together. He was anxious to buy out the large interest still held by old Mrs. Staple and talked of notes his wife had gotten hold of and that he was afraid his wife would use unwisely. Janey could see that his wife was a disagreeable peevish woman trying to use her mother’s money as a means of keeping a hold on J. Ward. She never said anything to the Tingleys about J. Ward personally, but she talked a great deal about the business and they agreed with her that the work was so interesting. She was looking forward to this Christmas because J. Ward had hinted that he would give her a raise.

A rainy Sunday afternoon she was typing off a confidential letter to Judge Planet inclosing a pamphlet from a detective agency describing the activities of labor agitators among the Colorado miners, and J. Ward was walking up and down in front of the desk staring with bent brows at the polished toes of his shoes when there was a knock on the outer office door. “I wonder who that could be?” said J. Ward. There was something puzzled and nervous about the way he spoke. “It may be Mr. Robbins forgotten his key,” said Janey. She went to see. When she opened the door Mrs. Moorehouse brushed past her. She wore a wet slicker and carried an umbrella, her face was pale and her nostrils were twitching. Janey closed the door gently and went to her own desk and sat down. She was worried. She took up a pencil and started drawing scrolls round the edge of a piece of typewriter paper. She couldn’t help hearing what was going on in J. Ward’s private office. Mrs. Moorehouse had shot in slamming the groundglass door behind her. “Ward, I can’t stand it… I won’t stand it another minute,” she was screaming at the top of her voice. Janey’s heart started beating very fast. She heard J. Ward’s voice low and conciliatory, then Mrs. Moorehouse’s. “I won’t be treated like that, I tell you. I’m not a child to be treated like that… You’re taking advantage of my condition. My health won’t stand being treated like that.”

“Now look here, Gertrude, on my honor as a gentleman,” J. Ward was saying. “There’s nothing in it, Gertrude. You lie there in bed imagining things and you shouldn’t break in like this. I’m a very busy man. I have important transactions that demand my complete attention.”

Of course it’s outrageous, Janey was saying to herself.

“You’d still be in Pittsburgh working for Bessemer Products, Ward, if it wasn’t for me and you know it… You may despise me but you don’t despise dad’s money… but I’m through, I tell you. I’m going to start divorce…” “But, Gertrude, you know very well there’s no other woman in my life.” “How about this woman you’re seen round with all the time… what’s her name… Stoddard? You see, I know more than you think… I’m not the kind of woman you think I am, Ward. You can’t make a fool of me, do you hear?”

Mrs. Moorehouse’s voice rose into a rasping shriek. Then she seemed to break down and Janey could hear her sobbing. “Now, Gertrude,” came Ward’s voice soothingly, “you’ve gotten yourself all wrought up over nothing… Eleanor Stoddard and I have had a few business dealings… She’s a bright woman and I find her stimulating… intellectually, you understand… We’ve occasionally eaten dinner together, usually with mutual friends, and that’s absolutely…” Then his voice sunk so low that Janey couldn’t hear what he was saying. She began to think she ought to slip out. She didn’t know what to do.

She’d half gotten to her feet when Mrs. Moorehouse’s voice soared to a hysterical shriek again. “Oh, you’re cold as a fish… You’re just a fish. I’d like you better if it was true, if you were having an affair with her… But I don’t care; I won’t be used as a tool to use dad’s money.” The door of the private office opened and Mrs. Moorehouse came out, gave Janey a bitter glare as if she suspected her relations with J. Ward too, and went out. Janey sat down at her desk again trying to look unconcerned. Inside the private office she could hear J. Ward striding up and down with a heavy step. When he called her his voice sounded weak:

“Miss Williams.”

She got up and went into the private office with her pencil and pad in one hand. J. Ward started to dictate as if nothing had happened but half way through a letter to the president of the Ansonia Carbide Corporation he suddenly said, “Oh, hell,” and gave the wastebasket a kick that sent it spinning against the wall.

“Excuse me, Miss Williams; I’m very much worried… Miss Williams, I’m sure I can trust you not to mention it to a soul… You understand, my wife is not quite herself; she’s been ill… the last baby… you know those things sometimes happen to women.”

Janey looked up at him. Tears had started into her eyes. “Oh, Mr. Moorehouse, how can you think I’d not understand?… Oh, it must be dreadful for you, and this is a great work and so interesting.” She couldn’t say any more. Her lips couldn’t form any words. “Miss Williams,” J. Ward was saying, “I… er… appreciate… er.” Then he picked up the wastepaper basket. Janey jumped up and helped him pick up the crumpled papers and trash that had scattered over the floor. His face was flushed from stooping. “Grave responsibilities… Irresponsible woman may do a hell of a lot of damage, you understand.” Janey nodded and nodded. “Well, where were we? Let’s finish up and get out of here.”

They set the wastebasket under the desk and started in on the letters again.

All the way home to Chelsea, picking her way through the slush and pools of water on the streets, Janey was thinking of what she’d liked to have said to J. Ward to make him understand that everybody in the office would stand by him whatever happened.

When she got in the apartment, Eliza Tingley said a man had called her up. “Sounded like a rather rough type; wouldn’t give his name; just said to say Joe had called up and that he’d call up again.” Janey felt Eliza’s eyes on her inquisitively.

“That’s my brother Joe, I guess… He’s a… he’s in the merchant marine.”

Some friends of the Tingleys came in, they had two tables of bridge and were having a very jolly evening when the telephone rang again, and it was Joe. Janey felt herself blushing as she talked to him. She couldn’t ask him up and still she wanted to see him. The others were calling to her to play her hand. He said he had just got in and that he had some presents for her and he’d been clear out to Flatbush and that the yids there had told him she lived in Chelsea now and he was in the cigar store at the corner of Eighth Avenue. The others were calling to her to play her hand. She found herself saying that she was very busy doing some work and wouldn’t he meet her at five tomorrow at the office building where she worked. She asked him again how he was and he said, “Fine,” but he sounded disappointed. When she went back to her table they all kidded her about the boyfriend and she laughed and blushed, but inside she felt mean because she hadn’t asked him to come up.

Next evening it snowed. When she stepped out of the elevator crowded to the doors at five o’clock she looked eagerly round the vestibule. Joe wasn’t there. As she was saying goodnight to Gladys she saw him through the door. He was standing outside with his hands deep in the pockets of a blue peajacket. Big blobs of snowflakes spun round his face that looked lined and red and weatherbeaten.

“Hello, Joe,” she said.

“Hello, Janey.”

“When did you get in?”

“A couple days ago.”

“Are you in good shape, Joe? How do you feel?”

“I gotta rotten head today… Got stinkin’ last night.”

“Joe, I was so sorry about last night but there were a lot of people there and I wanted to see you alone so we could talk.”

Joe grunted.

“That’s awright, Janey… Gee, you’re lookin’ swell. If any of the guys saw me with you they’d think I’d picked up somethin’ pretty swell awright.”

Janey felt uncomfortable. Joe had on heavy workshoes and there were splatters of gray paint on his trouserlegs. He had a package wrapped in newspaper under his arm.

“Let’s go eat somewheres… Jez, I’m sorry I’m not rigged up better. We lost all our duffle, see, when we was torpedoed.”

“Were you torpedoed again?”

Joe laughed, “Sure, right off Cape Race. It’s a great life… Well, that’s strike two… I brought along your shawl though, by God if I didn’t… I know where we’ll eat; we’ll eat at Lüchow’s.”

“Isn’t Fourteenth Street a little…”

“Naw, they got a room for ladies… Janey, you don’t think I’d take you to a dump wasn’t all on the up an’ up?”

Crossing Union Square a seedylooking young man in a red sweater said, “Hi, Joe.” Joe dropped back of Janey for a minute and he and the young man talked with their heads together. Then Joe slipped a bill in his hand, said, “So long, Tex,” and ran after Janey who was walking along feeling a little uncomfortable. She didn’t like Fourteenth Street after dark. “Who was that, Joe?” “Some damn AB or other. I knew him down New Orleans… I call him Tex. I don’t know what his name is… He’s down on his uppers.” “Were you down in New Orleans?” Joe nodded. “Took a load a molasses out on the Henry B. Higginbotham… Piginbottom we called her. Well, she’s layin’ easy now on the bottom awright… on the bottom of the Grand Banks.” When they went in the restaurant the headwaiter looked at them sharply and put them at a table in the corner of a little inside room. Joe ordered a big meal and some beer, but Janey didn’t like beer so he had to drink hers too. After Janey had told him all the news about the family and how she liked her job and expected a raise Christmas and was so happy living with the Tingleys who were so lovely to her, there didn’t seem to be much to say. Joe had bought tickets to the Hippodrome but they had plenty of time before that started. They sat silent over their coffee and Joe puffed at a cigar. Janey finally said it was a shame the weather was so mean and that it must be terrible for the poor soldiers in the trenches and she thought the Huns were just too barbarous and the Lusitania and how silly the Ford peace ship idea was. Joe laughed in the funny abrupt way he had of laughing now, and said: “Pity the poor sailors out at sea on a night like this.” He got up to get another cigar.

Janey thought what a shame it was he’d had his neck shaved when he had a haircut; his neck was red and had little wrinkles in it and she thought of the rough life he must be leading and when he came back she asked him why he didn’t get a different job. “You mean in a shipyard? They’re making big money in shipyards, but hell, Janey, I’d rather knock around… It’s all for the experience, as the feller said when they blew his block off.” “No, but there are boys not half so bright as you are with nice clean jobs right in my office… and a future to look forward to.”

“All my future’s behind me,” said Joe with a laugh. “Might go down to Perth Amboy get a job in a munitions factory, but I rather be blowed up in the open, see?”

Janey went on to talk about the war and how she wished we were in it to save civilization and poor little helpless Belgium. “Can that stuff, Janey,” said Joe. He made a cutting gesture with his big red hand above the tablecloth. “You people don’t understand it, see… The whole damn war’s crooked from start to finish. Why don’t they torpedo any French Line boats? Because the Frogs have it all set with the Jerries, see, that if the Jerries leave their boats alone they won’t shell the German factories back of the front. What we wanta do’s sit back and sell ’em munitions and let ’em blow ’emselves to hell. An’ those babies are makin’ big money in Bordeaux and Toulouse or Marseilles while their own kin are shootin’ daylight into each other at the front, and it’s the same thing with the limeys… I’m tellin’ ye, Janey, this war’s crooked, like every other goddam thing.”

Janey started to cry. “Well, you needn’t curse and swear all the time.” “I’m sorry, sister,” said Joe humbly, “but I’m just a bum an’ that’s about the size of it an’ not fit to associate with a nicedressed girl like you.” “No, I didn’t mean that,” said Janey, wiping her eyes.

“Gee, but I forgot to show you the shawl.” He unwrapped the paper package. Two Spanish shawls spilled out on the table, one of black lace and the other green silk embroidered with big flowers. “Oh, Joe, you oughtn’t to give me both of them… You ought to give one to your best girl.” “The kinda girls I go with ain’t fit to have things like that… I bought those for you, Janey.” Janey thought the shawls were lovely and decided she’d give one of them to Eliza Tingley.

They went to the Hippodrome but they didn’t have a very good time. Janey didn’t like shows like that much and Joe kept falling asleep. When they came out of the theater it was bitterly cold. Gritty snow was driving hard down Sixth Avenue almost wiping the “L” out of sight. Joe took her home in a taxi and left her at her door with an abrupt, “So long, Janey.” She stood a moment on the step with her key in her hand and watched him walking west towards Tenth Avenue and the wharves, with his head sunk in his peajacket.

That winter the flags flew every day on Fifth Avenue. Janey read the paper eagerly at breakfast; at the office there was talk of German spies and submarines and atrocities and propaganda. One morning a French military mission came to call on J. Ward, handsome pale officers with blue uniforms and red trousers and decorations. The youngest of them was on crutches. They’d all of them been severely wounded at the front. When they’d left, Janey and Gladys almost had words because Gladys said officers were a lot of lazy loafers and she’d rather see a mission of private soldiers. Janey wondered if she oughtn’t to tell J. Ward about Gladys’s pro-Germanism, whether it mightn’t be her patriotic duty. The Comptons might be spies; weren’t they going under an assumed name? Benny was a socialist or worse, she knew that. She decided she’d keep her eyes right open.

The same day G. H. Barrow came in. Janey was in the private office with them all the time. They talked about President Wilson and neutrality and the stockmarket and the delay in transmission in the Lusitania note. G. H. Barrow had had an interview with the president. He was a member of a committee endeavoring to mediate between the railroads and the Brotherhoods that were threatening a strike. Janey liked him better than she had on the private car coming up from Mexico, so that when he met her in the hall just as he was leaving the office she was quite glad to talk to him and when he asked her to come out to dinner with him, she accepted and felt very devilish.

All the time G. H. Barrow was in New York he took Janey out to dinner and the theater. Janey had a good time and she could always kid him about Queenie if he tried to get too friendly going home in a taxi. He couldn’t make out where she’d found out about Queenie and he told her the whole story and how the woman kept hounding him for money, but he said that now he was divorced from his wife and there was nothing she could do. After making Janey swear she’d never tell a soul, he explained that through a legal technicality he’d been married to two women at the same time and that Queenie was one of them and that now he’d divorced them both, and there was nothing on earth Queenie could do but the newspapers were always looking for dirt and particularly liked to get something on a liberal like himself devoted to the cause of labor. Then he talked about the art of life and said American women didn’t understand the art of life; at least women like Queenie didn’t. Janey felt very sorry for him but when he asked her to marry him she laughed and said she really would have to consult counsel before replying. He told her all about his life and how poor he’d been as a boy and then about jobs as stationagent and freightagent and conductor and the enthusiasm with which he’d gone into work for the Brotherhood and how his muckraking articles on conditions in the railroads had made him a name and money so that all his old associates felt he’d sold out, but that, so help me, it wasn’t true. Janey went home and told the Tingleys all about the proposal, only she was careful not to say anything about Queenie or bigamy, and they all laughed and joked about it and it made Janey feel good to have been proposed to by such an important man and she wondered why it was such interesting men always fell for her and regretted they always had that dissipated look, but she didn’t know whether she wanted to marry G. H. Barrow or not.

At the office next morning, she looked him up in Who’s Who and there he was, Barrow, George Henry, publicist… but she didn’t think she could ever love him. At the office that day J. Ward looked very worried and sick and Janey felt so sorry for him and quite forgot about G. H. Barrow. She was called into a private conference J. Ward was having with Mr. Robbins and an Irish lawyer named O’Grady, and they said did she mind if they rented a safe deposit box in her name to keep certain securities in and started a private account for her at the Bankers Trust. They were forming a new corporation. There were business reasons why something of the sort might become imperative. Mr. Robbins and J. Ward would own more than half the stock of a new concern and would work for it on a salary basis. Mr. Robbins looked very worried and a little drunk and kept lighting cigarettes and forgetting them on the edge of the desk and kept saying, “You know very well, J.W., that anything you do is O.K. by me.” J. Ward explained to Janey that she’d be an officer of the new corporation but of course would in no way be personally liable. It came out that old Mrs. Staple was suing J. Ward to recover a large sum of money and that his wife had started divorce proceedings in Pennsylvania and that she was refusing to let him go home to see the children and that he was living at the McAlpin.

“Gertrude’s lost her mind,” said Mr. Robbins genially. Then he slapped J. Ward on the back. “Looks like the fat was in the fire now,” he roared. “Well, I’m goin’ out to lunch; a man must eat… and drink… even if he’s a putative bankrupt.” J. Ward scowled and said nothing and Janey thought it was in very bad taste to talk like that and so loud too.

When she went home that evening she told the Tingleys that she was going to be a director of the new corporation and they thought it was wonderful that she was getting ahead so fast and that she really ought to ask for a raise even if business was in a depressed state. Janey smiled, and said, “All in good time.” On the way home she had stopped in the telegraph office on Twentythird Street and wired G. H. Barrow, who had gone up to Washington: let’s just be friends.

Eddy Tingley brought out a bottle of sherry and at dinner he and Eliza drank a toast, “To the new executive,” and Janey blushed crimson and was very pleased. Afterwards they played a rubber of dummy bridge.