Mr. Cavendish glanced over his quiet, expensive raiment appreciatively.
“Oh, yes, they’re as cool as anything we poor devils of men can wear on a day like this. My floor? Good morning!”
He stepped out of the elevator, smiling. Sally dreamily revolved the wheel that closed the doors and started the elevator up again. As a matter of fact, she had no brother, but chances of a couple of minutes uninterrupted talk with a real gentleman like Mr. Cavendish were few. Even as it was, she had risked something — the proprietors of the Metal Products Building did not encourage talkativeness on the part of its elevator girls. “Complete refinement in deportment,” said the little booklet on Service, “is a more than necessary adjunct for each and every one of our employees.”
Sally sighed. She knew her deportment was not all that it should be, in spite of the correspondence course in The Etiquette of Fashionable Society she had just completed. But how were you ever going to get to know real swell people if you just stood on your feet all day long, like a dummy, and never opened your face?
Sally had been an elevator girl in the Metal Products Building for a little over a year. It was the “refinedness” of the thing — the opportunities for acquiring culture and social polish as well as, possibly, in the future, a real, “Ritzy” husband — that had appealed to her in taking the job in the first place. She not only had the normal American yearnings to rise above the station in which birth had placed her — she had original ideas on how it might be done and was strongly determined to do it.
There were plenty of millionaires who married their private secretaries, their nurses, even their cooks. She read about them in the papers — enviously. But Sally could not spell, sick people made her nervous, and she always got hot when she cooked. Very well, then, why not start a precedent herself? “Wealthy Clubman Weds Elevator Girl. Her Politeness Impressed Me From the First, Says New-made Benedict.”
She could see it all now, with many pictures, on the front pages of all of the papers.
At first, the Metal Products Building had seemed to offer a happy hunting ground. The uniform she had to wear was becoming, the pay acceptable, and clients of wealth and refinement were in evidence throughout. The Metal Products Building was one of the very latest downtown skyscrapers. Hand-wrought bronze register gratings, vast marble columns in the entrance hall, indirect lighting from alabaster bowls; even Sally’s elevator had the air of a Roman boudoir.
“Gee, this is the place for me!” thought Sally, when she first envisaged the ensemble.
But now that a year had passed, she began to wonder. It was easy enough to get acquainted, but most of the acquaintances were the wrong kind — fat, perspiring men who called her “sister” and leered when they were alone with her in the car — scrubby, uninteresting bookkeepers and filing clerks who, if she gave them half a chance, would doubtless display intentions as honorable as they were dull. Really, Sally thought, it was only Mr. Cavendish who kept her on the job.
She sighed again. He was certainly a darb. The perfection of his teeth when he smiled was what had first attracted her, she admitted. Girls were so silly. Or, maybe, it was his looks in general — handsome but manly — he wasn’t one of those pretty-pretty boys. And his clothes! And his heavy, expensive English shoes! And his grand manners! And here he was — couldn’t be more than thirty, and yet he was manager or something of the Continental Perfume Company on the eighth floor. That seemed a funny business, somehow, for a real man like him to be in, but then he had his artistic side, too. They’d talked about things, and he was always so nice and democratic with everybody.
Sally dreamed. To all appearances she opened and shut doors, sped up and down, said “Floor, please!” Really, however, she was rescuing a wounded, but uncomplaining, Mr. Cavendish from a burning building just as they do in the movies. Her reverie was rudely interrupted.
“Well, how’s Nellie, the beautiful cloak model, today?” said a jarring voice.
Sally hardly bothered to turn her head. “Oh. hello, Mr. Considine,” she said wearily. “The nineteenth?”
“Yea, my fair damsel, an’ it please thee,” said the sandy-haired young man with the Irish nose. “Old King Brady is on the trail again, and trouble may be expected to pop almost any time this morning. Say, Sally, when are you off?”
“Five thirty,” said Sally mechanically. “Here’s your floor.”
The young man lingered. “Meet me at the trysting oak!” he murmured with an absurd gesture. “The Merrivale Street entrance, kid. I would have words with thee — words of import and gravity.”
“Fat chance!” said Sally. She slammed the doors and shot upward. Billy Considine, she considered, was just the kind of bird that didn’t get you anywhere! A little, fresh ham detective — an irritatingly unsquelchable hanger-on! No matter if she had had to tell him five times that she’d be a sister to him, tonight she positively wouldn’t — she positively—
Five thirty found her sweeping haughtily out of the Merrivale Street entrance. But a block away she found herself taken affectionately by the arm.
She turned freezingly. “Now, Billy Considine—”
“Aw, Sally, be reasonable!”
“Billy, I told you—”
“Aw, yes, but this is important.” She groaned exasperatedly. “Well?”
“Well, the chief just kicked through with a bonus on that bum check business. So how about Ugugli’s and a couple of cups of red ink?”
“I beg your pardon. I am engaged for the evening.”
“Aw, Sally, you’re not! And then we could go to Harmonyland and shake a little toe or two.”
Sally began to weaken. She loved to dance. “Well, Billy — only, you understand, it’s the last time.”
“Till the next time,” said Billy, and grinned. “Right you are, my queen of the elevator shafts! How’s the beautiful Mr. Cavendish today?”
It took him four subway stops to pacify her, but he managed it. There was something horribly persistent about Billy Considine. Later, discussing the dubious antipasto with which Ugugli’s celebrated dollar dinner began, Sally found it necessary to be polite.
“How’s the work going, Billy?”
“Like a breeze, my fair flower,” said Billy gallantly, “like a Coney Island breeze.” Then he grew more veracious. “And saps out in Hicksville Center think it must be the berries to be a private detective!” he groaned. “Oh, just so exciting and everything. Exciting — blah! This morning I get up in the night to go out and work on a fat Dutchman the chief thinks is up to some funny business or other. I trail him around all day, till Sullivan takes over the job, and the worst thing he does is to take a golf lesson at Mimbel’s, with the thermometer up so high it fairly makes me drip every time I think of him. Then I write my report and quit — and, oh yes — strike the chief for my bonus, and he gives it to me all right, but says I’ve been dead on my feet all month, except for that one piece of luck, and to get busy from now forward, or I’ll be sleeping out in the park. If they’d only give me a real case, once in a while.”
He stabbed viciously at a flaccid slab of pimento. “How about you, Sal? Everything sittin’ pretty?”
“Well, if you think you have a stupid time, Billy Considine! Seems to me every day I live’s just like every other day, except for the date. Sometimes I think if they put me on the other shift — the expresses to the twentieth — things’d be different. But—”
“Oh, there wouldn’t be any difference,” said Billy gloomily. “What’s the use? If I could grab off a big bunch of kale — or get hold of a classy crime — I want to start my own agency, Sal — I know I could get away with it. I’m sick of these routine jobs. But you’ve got to have a rep to—”