Eveley whirled about and stared into the face of the small lad whose
features had seemed so curiously familiar.
"To-morrow?" she repeated.
"Surest thing you know, at the office," he said, grinning impishly at her
evident inability to place him. "I knew all the time you didn't know me.
I am Angelo Moreno, the Number Three elevator boy at the Rollo Building."
"Do--do you know who I am?"
"Sure, you're Miss Ainsworth, old Jim Hodgin's private secretary."
"How long have you been there?"
"About a year and a half."
"I never noticed," she said, and there was pain in her voice.
"Oh, well," he said soothingly, "there's always a jam going up and down
when you do, and you are tired evenings."
"But you are in the jam, too, and you are tired as well as I, but you
have seen."
"That's my job," he said complacently. "I got to know the folks in our
building."
"How much do you know about me?" she pursued with morbid curiosity.
He grinned at her again, companionably. "You're twenty-five years old,
and you're stuck on that fellow Inglish, with Morrow and Mayne over at
the Holland Building. You used to live with your aunt up on Thorn Street,
but she died and you got the house. B. T. Raines is your brother-in-law,
and he's got two kids, but his wife is not as good-looking as you are.
You stayed with them two months after your aunt died, but last week you
got a bunch of your beaux, soldiers and things, to build you some steps
up the outside of your house and now you live up there by yourself. Gee,
I'd think you'd be afraid of pirates and Greasers and things coming up
that canyon from the bay to rob you--you being just a woman alone up
there."
Eveley gazed upon him in blank astonishment. "Do--do you know that much
about everybody in our building?" she asked.
"Well, I know plenty about most of 'em, and some things that some of 'em
don't know I know, and wouldn't be keen on having talked around among
strangers. But of course I pays the most attention to the good-lookers,"
he admitted frankly.
"Thank you," said Eveley, with a faint smile. Then she flushed. "What
nerve for me to talk of assimilation," she said. "We don't know how to go
about it. We have been asleep and blind and careless and stupid, but
you--why, you will assimilate us, if we don't look out. You are a born
assimilator, Angelo, do you know that?"
"I guess so," came the answer vaguely, but politely. "I live about half a
mile below you, Miss Ainsworth, at the foot of the canyon on the bay
front. That's all the diff there is between us and you highbrows in
Mission Hills--about half a mile of canyon." He smiled broadly, pleased
with his fancy.
"That isn't much, is it, Angelo? And it will be less pretty soon, now
that we are trying to open our eyes. Good night, Angelo. I will see you
to-morrow--really see you, I mean. And please don't assimilate me quite
so fast--you must give me time. I--I am new to this business and progress
very slowly."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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