Just Around the Corner: Romance en casseroleHurst, Fannie
General
Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole
Hurst, Fannie
New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Short stories
Goldie, however, up in her ninth-floor offices, and bent to an angle of
forty-five degrees over the denouement of white-slave drama that
promised a standing-room-only run and the free advertising of
censorship, had little time or concern for her various atrophies.
It was nearly six o'clock, and she wanted half a yard of pink tulle
before the shops closed. Besides, hers were the problems of the
six-million-dollar incorporateds, who hire girls for six dollars a week;
for the small-eyed, large-diamoned birds of prey who haunt the
glove-counters and lace departments of the six-million-dollar
incorporateds with invitations to dinner; and for the night courts,
which are struggling to stanch the open gap of the social wound with
medicated gauze instead of a tight tourniquet.
A yard of pink tulle cut to advantage would make a fresh yoke that would
brighten even a three-year-old, gasolene-cleaned blouse. Harry Trimp
liked pink tulle. Most Harry Trimps do.
At twenty minutes before six the lead-colored dusk of January crowded
into the Gregory typewriting office so thick that the two figures
before the two typewriters faded into the veil of gloom like a Corot
landscape faints into its own mist.
Miss Flint ripped the final sheet of her second act from the roll of her
machine, reached out a dim arm that was noisy with bracelets, and
clicked on the lights. The two figures at the typewriters, the
stationary wash-stand in the corner, a roll-top desk, and the
heat-lightning tints in Miss Flint's hair sprang out in the jaundiced
low candle-power.
"I'm done the second act, Miss Gregory. May I go now?"
Miss Flint's eyes were shining with the love-of-life lamps, the mica
powder of romance, and a brilliant anticipation of Harry Trimp. Miss
Gregory's were twenty years older and dulled like glass when you
breathed on it.
"Yes; if you got to go I guess you can."
"Ain't it a swell play, Miss Gregory? Ain't it grand where he pushes her
to the edge of the bridge and she throws herself down and hugs his
knees?"
"Did you red ink your stage directions in, with the margin wide, like he
wants? He was fussy about the first act."
"Yes'm; and say, ain't it a swell name for a show--'The Last of the
Dee-Moolans'? Give me a show to do every time, and you can have all your
contracts and statements and multigraph letters. Those love stories that
long, narrow fellow brings in are swell to do, too, if he wa'n't such an
old grouch about punctuation. Give me stuff that has some reading in it
every time!"
Miss Gregory sniffed--the realistic, acidulated sniff of unloved forty
and a thin nose.
"The sooner you quit curlin' your side-hair and begin to learn that
life's made up of statements and multigraphs, instead of love scenes on
papier-mache bridges and flashy fellows in checked suits and
get-rich-quick schemes, the better off you're going to be."
The light in Goldie's face died out as suddenly as a Jack-o'-lantern
when you blow on the taper.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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