Winnie Childs by C. N. Williamson

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"What a shame to feed their people like this!" exclaimed Win, who had
thought she was hungry, but now found herself mistaken. And again the
eyes of Peter Rolls, Jr., seemed to be looking straight into hers. No
wonder he was what his sister hinted at if he knew all about this and
had not the heart to care! And if he didn't trouble to know, it was
just as bad.

"They don't want to feed us, you see," said Sadie, slowly finishing a
baked apple which looked like a head-hunter's withered trophy. "On the
low prices they're obliged to charge they can't make a cent offen us.
Besides if all the guyls et in the house they'd have to give up more
of their valuable room. They'd rather we'd go out, so long as we're
back in time. Only the poorest ones, who have to look twice at every
cent, feed in the restaurant as a reg'lar thing; or the weak ones,
who're so dead tired they can't bear to take a nextra step. And oh, by
the way, talkin' o' that, you'll need foot powder. Your first week
your feet'll hurt that bad you'll be ready to bawl. But if you can
stand it and your back bein' broke in two at the waist it'll be better
the week after, and so on, till you won't notice so much. Now I _must_
go or I'll be docked, and I ain't the betrothed of a millionaire yet.
But tell me where you live. Me and you might see something of e'
juther, if you feel the way I do."

"I liked you the minute I looked round the corner of my shoulder and
saw you plastered onto my back!" laughed Win, already revived, not by
the food, but by some subtle emanation of strength and sympathy from
the more experienced girl. "I wish I could live near you. The
boarding-house where I am is too expensive, and I've given notice to
leave on Saturday."

"My! You'd turn up your nose at Columbus Avenue, I guess," said Miss
Kirk. "That's where I hang out. It ain't a boardin'-house. What's the
use shellin' out for meals and not bein' home to them? I'd like awful
well to have you in the same movie with me. There ain't a guyl I care
to speak to on the film! But the 'L' runs past the place, and some
folks say it otta be spelled with 'H.' The noise pretty near drove me
bughouse at fyst, but I'm settlin' down to it now. And oh, say, that
big feller whose best lion died on him (good thing 'twasn't his best
guyl!) he told me he's come to Columbus to room with the chum w'at put
him onto wuykin for the Hands. He's in the toy department with me and
feels real at home with the Teddy bears. I could get you a room in my
house for two dollars per."

"Per what?" Win was obliged to ask.

"Per week. Per everything. And if you take my tips about grub, and do
your own waists and hank'chiffs Sundays--laundry 'em, I mean, instead
of wallerin' in bed like a sassiety bud, you'll have money to burn or
put in the mishrunny box."

"I'll come!" exclaimed Win. "Please engage the room. If it's good
enough for you, it's good enough for me, and I'll put up with the
noise for the sake of your society."

"My! Thanks for the bookays and choclits! Ta, ta! I'll wait for you
to-night at the stage entrance with the other Johnnies."

She was off with the promptness of a soubrette after an "exit
speech," and Win was left to sip her stale coffee or spend what
remained of her "off time" in the rest room next door.

Legally, Peter Rolls was supposed to give his hands an hour for the
midday meal, but in the rush of the holiday season a way had been
found for whipping the inconvenient little law devil round the post.
Employees were asked to "lend" the management half of the legally
allotted hour, the time to be repaid them later, so that after
Christmas they might take once a week an hour and a half in the middle
of the day instead of an hour. Those in the know had learned that, as
on Christmas Eve most of the extra hands received with their pay
envelope a week's notice to quit, they, at least, never got back the
half-hours lent. As for the permanent hands, it would amount to a
black mark secretly put against their names if they dared lay claim to
the time owing. Win, however, was blissfully ignorant of this, and
though she was tired, the arrangement seemed fair to her. As she got
up from the table to spend fifteen minutes in the rest room she was
almost happy in the thought of having the sardine for a neighbour.

Two of the girls who had come up from the bargain square with her, on
the return of Miss Stein and their other seniors, looked after Win as
she passed out of the restaurant.

"There goes Miss Thank-you-I-beg-your-pardon," said the young lady who
had wondered if 2884 were a spy. "She's got a smile as if she was
invited to tea with the Vanderbilts."

"By this time next week I bet she smiles the wrong side of her mouth
if she puts on any airs with Dora Stein."

"Hum-m, yeh. Unless what you think's so, and she's on the right side
o' Father."

It was true, as the girls had warned the new hand, when six
o'clock--closing time--came, you "couldn't chase the dames out." The
salespeople began to put things away, and some even ventured to remind
customers that the shop shut at six; but ladies who believed
themselves possessed of the kindest hearts on earth pleaded that they
must have _one_ more thing, only _just_ one, to complete their list
for that day. Those who were too cross and tired to think about hearts
or anything else except their own nerves, made no excuses at all, but
demanded what they wanted or threatened a report to the floorwalker if
a saleswoman were "disagreeable."

"Look at them!" snapped Miss Stein, maddened by a consignment of more
blouses from the bankrupt sale (which had brought upon Horrocks the
gibes of the head buyer), blouses without sashes, which not even
Poiret could have turned into "Pavlovas." "Look at them, the fat, old,
self-satisfied lemons, with their hats and their dresses and their
squeezed-in corsets and shoes, and even their back hair, bought in
sweat shops like ours! Pills, going to their homes to say their
prayers, and then, full o' dinner, to the meeting of the Anti-Sweats.
I know em! Maybe _they'll_ do some o' the sweatin' in kingdom come!"

Already Win had learned that a "lemon" or a "pill" was a customer who
made as much trouble as possible for as small as possible a return;
but it gave her a stab to hear Peter Rolls's great department store
called a "sweat shop." Again she saw the eyes. Was she never to get
rid of the memory of those hypocritical blue eyes?

Nobody thought of being ready for home until nearly ten o'clock; and
long before that Miss Stein's nerves felt as if they had been run,
like threads, through the eyes of hot needles. Again Win had helped
her in the afternoon by placing blouses of congenial colours together
on the counters instead of letting them lie anyhow, as Miss Stein, in
her recklessness, would have done. But less than ever had the elder
girl seen reason for thanking Miss Child when the second instalment of
"punk" goods was brought out of "reserve."

If the first lot had not gone off so soon they would not have been
saddled with this, and so 2884 had, in Miss Stein's estimation, done
nothing at the end of the day except "show herself off" and make
everybody work twice as hard as necessary. She would not tell Win how
to put things away, or let anybody else help her out.

"You gotta learn for yourself or you never will," she said sharply,
all the more sharply because Fred Thorpe, the floorwalker, happened to
be within earshot.

"I don't care what he thinks of me!" she said fiercely to herself,
knowing that Thorpe would understand and disapprove her injustice to
the new girl. But it was only half true that she did not care.

She was longing desperately for somebody to love her; and though she
could not in decency have accepted, after the way she had treated him,
she wished that Thorpe would ask her to have supper with him that
night. The Westlake pig, she knew, was going to Dorlon's for a pan
roast with Horrocks, for the creature had told all the girls who were
sure to run with it to her, Dora Stein. Thorpe would have been a faded
flag to flaunt in the face of the enemy--a floorwalker, to one who had
mashed a department manager! Still it would have been comforting to
know that she still had attractions for some one, and at least she
would have liked the chance to refuse an invitation.

Thorpe, on his part, would joyfully have asked her, for he could not
quite "unlove" the beautiful face he had once adored, though he knew
now exactly what a fierce spirit lived behind it. He was well aware of
his own weakness and was humble enough to confuse with it the kindness
of heart which permitted such treatment as he had received.

No girl, not even Dora Stein herself, would dare risk offending any
other of the floorwalkers, men able to break a saleswoman if they "got
a down" on her. But Dora knew only too well that he would not demean
himself to take revenge on her or any one. And probably she believed
that he would not punish or even "call her down" for injustice to a
newcomer.

Thorpe was miserable that night, for he had missed few incidents of
the day in Dora's neighbourhood. He recognized a "live wire" when he
saw one, and he did see that 2884 had "stuff" in her. She deserved to
be praised, and encouragement was all that she needed to turn her into
a valuable saleswoman, one who might become a "real winner" some day.
He could help her by speaking a few kind words, but Miss Stein would
think them spoken on purpose to spite her, and that wouldn't do 2884
much good if she stayed in the blouse department. Also he could help
her by mentioning in the right quarter her generalship in the matter
of the "Pavlovas" instead of letting Dora take the credit. But if he
did the girl any sort of justice he would be harming Miss Stein.

"I don't know what to do! I guess I shall have to leave the thing to
Providence--and the devil take the hindmost!" he thought gloomily.

It seemed to Win, as she went out at last, a week since she had come
in by the same door. It was like a play she had seen, where, in the
second act, the people who had been young in the first were
middle-aged when the curtain next rose; and in the third they were
old, all in the course of a few hours. But a year or two seemed to
drop from her shoulders when she caught sight of Miss Kirk waiting for
her in the street. Beside Miss Kirk, to the surprise of 2884, towered
the lion tamer.

"Well, I thought you'd never come!" was the greeting of Sadie. "But
all's well that ends well. And Mr. Teddy Lion here wants to take us
some place for a little supper."

"That ain't no way to interdooce me to the lady, kid," said the big
fellow. "She won't look my way if you treat me light like that. My
name's Earl Usher. Honest truth, 'tis, off the bills! Y'will come
along, won't you?"

"You're very kind," Win began in the conventional way that he had
laughed at in the morning. Then, afraid of being teased again, she
said that she must go home.

"I don't know what my landlady will think," she excused herself. "I
walked out early this morning, never dreaming I should be gone until
late at night."

"Well, she can't kill you," suggested Miss Kirk, "and, anyhow, you're
leavin' the end of the week. I think you'll be real mean if you won't
come. I know what your reason is, and so does _he._ He ain't nobody's
fool. Do you s'pose I'm the sort would do anything myself, or ask you
to do anything, that wasn't all right? We ain't in the Four Hundred,
nor yet in court circles, I _don't_ think. And this ain't London nor
it ain't Boston. Thank Gawd it's little old N'York."

"But---" Win persisted, and stopped.

"I know what's got her goat," said Earl Usher. "It's that slush o'
mine this morning about not bein' a millionaire and my face needin' to
be fed. I thought afterward 'that's no talk for a gen'leman to use
before a lady.' Well, I may not be a millionaire at present, but I can
see my way to feedin' our t'ree faces and not feel the pinch."

"Ain't you the fresh guy?" exclaimed Miss Kirk. "Our faces are our
own, thank you _just_ the same, and this is a Dutch treat. You might
'a' knowed we'd stick _that_ close to ettiket. I can run to fifteen
cents, as far as I'm concerned How is it with you, Miss Child?"

"I can run to that, too," said Win.

"Same here," announced the big young man; "though I'd set my heart on
t'other kind o' treat. Where shall it be? I suppose we mustn't think
o' the Waldorf--what?"

"Huh!" snorted Miss Kirk, "not for mine, if I owned the mint! I bin to
the Waldorf wunst, of course. I went just out of curiosity to see how
the swells et. Wunst is enough, like goin' to the menagerie. Y'owe it
to yer intelligence to see all the different forms of animal life the
good Lord has created, behavin' accordin' to their kind, and then
come back to your own, thankin' Gawd you're not as they are. We'll eat
at Ginger Jim's, where we can lean our elbows on the tables and get
perfectly good oyster soup for ten cents a head!"

They walked for a while, Earl Usher insisting on the two girls taking
his arms, one on either side. By and by they got into a crosstown car,
and it was when Win was being helped out by the lion tamer that a
motor dashed past. The existence of people who went about in splendid
gray motor cars seemed to Win so far away from her own just then that,
standing in the street, her hand in Earl Usher's, she gazed into the
large, lighted window of the automobile as she might have gazed
through a powerful telescope at a scene of family life on Mars.

There were two girls in evening dress and two young men in the
illuminated chariot. It flashed by like a Leonid, but left a gay
impression of flower-tinted velvet cloaks and ermine and waved hair
with a glitter of diamonds and oval white shirtfronts and black coats.
Also a pair of eyes seemed to look for the twentieth part of a second
into Winifred's.

"I don't believe it was he!" she said to herself when the motor had
gone by.

CHAPTER XII

BLUE PETER

Peter Rolls, Sr., and Peter junior were both unhappy in vastly
different ways. One difference was that Peter junior knew he was
unhappy and suspected why. Peter senior had no idea that what he
suffered from was unhappiness. He thought that it was indigestion, and
he supposed that feeling as he felt was the normal state of men
passing beyond middle age. When you were growing old you could not
expect to keep much zest or personal interest in life or to enjoy
things, so he had always been told; and dully, resignedly, he believed
what "they" said.

If any one had told him that he was a miserable man he would have been
angry, and also surprised. Why the dickens should he be miserable? He
considered himself one of the most successful men in New York, and his
greatest pleasure was in recalling his successes, step by step, from
the time before he got his foot on the first rung of the ladder all
the way up to the top.

Often he lay awake at night pondering on those first days and first
ambitions. If he began to think of them when he went to bed it was
fatal. He became so pleasantly excited, and the past built itself up
so realistically all about him, that he could not go to sleep for
hours. What a sensational "bed book" is to some tired brains, that
was his past to the head of the Hands. Besides, he had everything in
the world that he or anybody else (it seemed to him) could possibly
want. Perhaps it was a little irritating when you could have all you
wanted not to know what to want. But, he consoled himself, that must
be so with all rich people. The best thing was not to think about it.

He was convinced that he loved mother as dearly as ever a husband had
loved a wife. They were uncomfortable together, but wretched apart.
That was marriage. There was nothing more in it.

They hadn't much to say to each other. But you never saw husbands and
wives chatting together like love birds after the honeymoon. You
wanted a bright-cheeked, laughing girl, and you got her. If you were
faithful to each other, and didn't have rows, it was an ideal match,
especially if there were children.

Peter Rolls was very fond of his children. When they were little they
had been the joy of his life; the thought of them had been the only
one that warmed his heart and gave him almost superhuman energy to
take the future by the horns like a bull and force a ring through its
bleeding nose that it might be ready for them to ride when they grew
up.

Now they were grown up, and they were riding; and it was natural that
the fire of the heart should have calmed. He was proud of the pair,
very proud. Pete (no, he mustn't call him by that name. Ena didn't
like it, said it sounded common) Peter--or Petro, if he preferred--was
a gentleman and made a good show for every dollar that had been spent
on him. Put him with an Astor or a Livingston and you couldn't tell
the difference!

Once, a long time ago, old Peter had dreamed of a young Peter
succeeding him in the business; but Ena had made him see what a
foolish dream that was--foolish and inconsistent, too--because, what
was the good of slaving to satisfy your ambition, and then, when you
reached the goal, instead of profiting by what you'd got, ordering
your heir down to the level you'd worked to leave behind?

Peter senior had entirely come round to Ena's view, and instead of
regretting that Peter junior hadn't in him the making of a hard-boiled
man of business who'll do anything to succeed, father stopped Peter
abruptly whenever he showed an inconvenient sign of interest in the
Hands and what went on under the glitter of their rings. Nor was
Peter's interest of the right kind. It was not what Peter senior
called practical.

Ena, now! There was a girl to be proud of. Father was so proud that
pride of his splendid daughter had frozen out or covered with ashes
the glow which used to fill his heart at the thought of her. But pride
was the right thing! That was what he had worked for: to make of his
children a man and woman to be proud of when the top stone was on his
pile.

Ena was _more_ than a lady. She was an orchid, a princess. She ruled
father with her little finger--a beautifully manicured, rose-and-white
finger, such as he had hardly seen when he was young. There was so
much of himself in Ena that Peter yielded to her mandates as to the
inarticulate cry of his own soul translated into words. The princess
in whose veins his blood ran must understand what he ought to want
better than he himself could understand.

She said: What was the fun of having money if you couldn't know all
the best people everywhere, and be of them as well as merely among
them? She began saying this even before she came home "for good" from
school. It was a school for millionaires' daughters, and the daughters
of other millionaires had showed her the difference between her father
and theirs, oil magnates and steel and railway magnates, and magnates
who magnated on their ancestors' fortunes made in land or skins of
animals.

Nothing really worth having--nothing really worth father's years of
hard work--could come to them as a family until Peter Rolls ceased to
identify himself personally with the Hands, Ena had pleaded, and at
last the head of the establishment engaged an official "understudy" to
represent him every day in the gorgeously furnished office which had
seemed to old Peter what the body is to the soul.

Rolls senior and Henry Croft, the man he appointed as dictator,
corresponded daily, by letter and telephone, but Peter Rolls himself
was not supposed to enter the great commercial village he had brought
together under one roof. Ena was able to say to any one rude enough to
ask, or to those she suspected of indiscreet curiosity: "Father never
goes _near_ the place. He's tired of business, and, luckily, he
doesn't need to bother."

She would not much have cared whether the statement were true or not
if she were sure that the carefully careless sounding words were
believed. But it would have been distressing to have any one say: "Ena
Rolls pretends that her father doesn't work in the shop any more, but
I know for a fact that he goes every day." So it comforted her to feel
sure that her arguments had really impressed father and that he never
did go to the Hands unless, perhaps twice a year or so for important
meetings. It pleased her that he had joined a rich club in New York
which had enough "swell" members to make it pleasant for her to remark
casually, "Father belongs to the Gotham."

When father went to New York in the evening, as he often did, not
returning to Sea Gull Manor till late, and sometimes staying away all
night, he used to say as an excuse to mother or Ena: "I'm going to the
club." After a while it was taken for granted, and he made no excuse
at all. But if Ena had known the mystery of those late evenings she
would have been struck with fear--the fear which comes of finding out
that those we think we know best are strangers to us.

Of all the sad millionaires of New York who pin together the pages of
certain mysterious life chapters not to be read by eyes at home,
perhaps no other had a mystery like that of Peter Rolls. It was now
the one thing that he intensely enjoyed; but it was a guilty, furtive
enjoyment which made a nervous wreck of him and ruined a stomach once
capable of salvation.

Peter junior had never been entirely happy since he left Yale at
twenty-three. It was only then that he began to look life in the face
and see the freckles on its complexion The minute he saw them on that
countenance which should be so beautiful, he wanted to help in some
way to rub them off. To help--to help! That was the great thing.

He didn't care much for business, but he felt that, being Peter
Rolls's only son, it was his duty to care. He imagined father deeply
hurt at the indifference of his two children to that which had been
his life--hurt, but hiding the wound with proud reserve. So Peter
junior determined to sacrifice himself. He offered to go into the
shop, to begin at the bottom if father wished, and in learning all
there was to learn, gradually work up to a place where he could be a
staff to lean upon.

It was in the "library" that they had this talk--an immense and
appalling room, all very new oak panelling and very new, uniform sets
of volumes bound in red leather and gold, with crests and bookplates,
bleakly glittering behind glass doors. Peter senior tried to kill time
there, because a library seemed to his daughter the right background
for a father, and Peter junior, who had saved mother's poor old
furniture for his own rooms, found it singularly difficult to open his
heart between walls that smelled of money and newness. However, he did
his best to blunder out the offer of himself; while the chill gleam in
his father's eyes (so remarkably like that of the bookcase glass
doors) made him feel, as he went on, that he must have begun all
wrong.

"So you don't trust your own father?" was the answer he got when he
stopped, as one might be stopped short by the sharp edge of a marble
mantelpiece when trying to find the way across a dark room.

"Don't--trust you?" stammered Peter, sure now that he was a fool not
to understand, not to have made his father understand.

"You think the old man's got past running his own business, and if
you don't want your money to go to the dogs you must look after it
yourself."

"Good heavens, no!" Peter broke out. "You can't dream that any such
thought entered my mind! I--why, Father, I'd rather die than have you
believe that of me."

"Prove I'm wrong, then," said the elder dryly, pulling, as was his
habit, a thin, grizzled beard with thin, sallow fingers. "You can do
it easy enough."

"How? Only tell me."

"By turning your attention to other things, my boy. Leave me alone to
manage what I know how to manage. You let me do it my own way, without
shoving in your oar, and don't you listen to what any of your highbrow
friends say about me and my methods behind my back."

"As if I would!"

"Well, I wasn't sure. You go with a set of raw boys who think they
know better than their fathers how to run creation; and now and then
you blow off some of those soap-bubble ideas in your conversation.
I've been kind of hurt once in a while, though I didn't let it out.
But now we're on the subject I will say: if you've got faith in the
old man, hands off the Hands!"

"That settles it, Father," returned Peter heavily. "I never meant to
hinder, only to help if I could. From now on the watchword is, 'hands
off the Hands!'"

This was a promise, and he kept it scrupulously. But the steady fire
in his heart was scattered as a flaming log is broken into many embers
by the clumsy stab of a poker. He had no longer a settled aim in life.
He saw no niche which he could fill, and felt that the world had no
particular use for the second Peter Rolls. The one thing he had
longed for as a boy, which did not now in his young manhood appear
stale and unprofitable, was a journey round the world and a glimpse of
the East. When his father said uneasily: "Why don't you travel, my
boy?" Peter answered that perhaps it would be a good thing.

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