The black pigeon

Front matter

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CHAPTER I BLACK pigeon, its iridescent breast gleaming in

the sunshine of the January morning, circled warily above the open window, then fluttered to the white stone ledge. The tiny head jerked back and forth, a brilliant black-diamond eye cocked suspiciously, as the little threetoed feet pattered just out of reach of the hand extended invitingly, palm upward.

“Satan, you old humbug!” the girl laughed softly. “Don’t Ritz me! I’m sure I don’t look so different this morning that you don’t know me. Is it because I have no crumbs to give you, greedy?”

The black pigeon stood still and studied the girl, his graceful head cocked consideringly. Then, as if reassured, the gleaming black wings spread to the cold sunshine and a second later the tiny red claws were gripping Ruth Lester’s forefinger.

As if they had been waiting for a signal from their leader, whom Ruth had named Satan, a flock of pigeons whose home was the roof of the seven-story Starbridge Building, came swooping down upon the broad ledge of the window outside the private office of Henry P. Borden, to pay court to the suddenly revealed beauty of Borden’s private secretary.

Ruth, with an exultant laugh, which was rich with new tenderness, spread her arms wide, leaning far out I i THE SLA CE PIGEO-m of the window. In a moment she was a living pigeon — perch. On her little white hands, along her pink-sweate arms, on her shoulders, even on her golden head, pigeons settled trustingly. Brown pigeons; blue-gray pigeons with enchanting breasts of bronze and gold and purple; black-and-white pigeons; white pigeons—no, only one that was pure white and only one, Satan, that was inky black.

An exclamation made the girl raise her blue eyes, but did not startle her, for she had been expecting it. Directly across the narrow airshaft that separated the two wings of the Starbridge Building, a broad window, exactly like the one from which Ruth leaned, framed a young man’s head and torso.

Ruth leaned further out of the window, impetuously, her arms reaching toward the man to whom she had become engaged only the night before. Jealously, the pigeons took wing and fluttered indignantly away—all but the black pigeon, which clung stubbornly to her finger, his beady black eyes flashing from the girl to the man,

“Oh, beautiful!” Jack Hayward called softly. “Little snow princess with the sun on her golden hair! You're too beautiful! Go put on your big yellow spectacles and slick back your hair. I’m jealous even of Satan and he’s jealous of me. Look! I believe he’d like to peck my eyes out!”

Ruth laughed, then very gently, so as not to frighten Satan away, she reached into the pocket of her shell-pink sweater. In a moment she was holding the struggling pigeon against her breast, as her quick, deft fingers wrapped a slip of paper with a typed message—‘I love you”—about one of the tiny red legs, securing it with a bit of black silk thread.

“If you have any bread crumbs, Mr. Hayward,” she laughed, “you may be able to learn something to your advantage.” And she let the black pigeon flutter away.

Then, because she heard the opening of the door to the outer office, where she was supposed to be sorting the morn ing mail, she drew in her golden head, and crossed the soberly but richly furnished room where “Handsome Harry” Borden conducted a business which had~need of every artificial aid to make it appear respectable. For Henry P. Borden was one of those financial vultures that prey upon the cupidity of men and the credulity of women who have hard-earned savings or small legacies to invest. His favorite boast to the sleek-haired, collegiate young stock salesman who worked for him was that he was “always within the law,” but Ruth Lester, in growing disgust, had come to hope that the law would not always be so obligingly elastic.

But now there was no need for her to worry about Harry Borden’s crookedness or about his offensive private life, or about anything in the world. For since exactly twelve o’clock last night she had been engaged to be married to John Carrington Hayward, who was listed on the bulletin board of the Starbridge Building as “Insurance Broker.” Broker! Ruth smiled tenderly at the boyish bravado of that title, for Jack hardly made enough selling insurance to pay the rent of his suite of two small offices, and the fifteen-dollar-a-week salary to the incompetent stenographer whom he grandly referred to as “my private secretary.” She loved his boyish cocksureness of success, but then—she loved everything about him, every inch of his tall, lean body, every hair on his coppery-brown héid! . . .

“Hullo, Ruth! Any mail for the future President of the United States?” a cocky, nasal young voice called from the outer office.

‘Ruth smiled, a dimple which she did not have to repress any longer tugging at the corner of her adorable little mouth. Then she stepped through the door that divided Borden’s private office- from the big: outer office which served as a reception room for clients and as an office for Borden’s secretary and office boy.

‘Benny Smith, seventeen, and just beginning to be very girl-conscious, was sprawled in Ruth’s narrow-backed swivel chair, pawing the pile of mail on her desk. His sandy hair was still wet from its morning brush, his big ears very red from the scrubbing to which they were not yet accustomed. Benny had told Ruth recently that he was using freckle cream on his speckled cheeks and neck.

“Nothing from your girl this morning, Benny,” Ruth answered, in the meek, repressed little voice which had been so necessary a part of the disguise she had temporarily discarded.

“Girl? Who said I had a girl?” Benny sputtered, whirling about in the little swivel chair. Then he saw Ruth and his prominent, pale gray eyes glared until the girl, coloring and laughing, was afraid they would pop from his head.

The boy’s gaze traveled in slow, stupefied amazement from the tip of Ruth’s smart watersnake pumps—size 4-AA, up to the slender, rounded little legs, shining softly in beige silk stockings, to the knife-pleated edge of the short, cream-colored serge skirt which barely covered the dimples in her knees; took in the shell-pink sweater which molded her almost childishly slim torso; on to the ivoryand-rose face, with its wide, curling-lashed blue eyes— pausing there while the office boy took a deep breath; then eA at last at the riotously curling mop of golden

air.

“Gee, gosh!” he exploded at last. “All right! I bite! Who are you?”

“Don’t be silly, Benny! It’s just Ruth Lester, of course—”

“Jul-yus Caesar!” Benny breathed. “‘It’s just Ruth Lester, of course,” he mimicked her precise, repressed voice. “Gosh, what have you went and done to yourself, Ruth? Gee! Be yourself! I ain’t feelin’ so strong this mornin’—”

Ruth laughed, all the richness and exultation of her mew happiness ringing out in her voice. “’That’s what I’m doing at last, Benny! I’m being myself! Do you like Ruth Lester herself?”

Benny rose slowly from Ruth’s chair, then lifted a crooked elbow as if to ward her off. “Gosh, woman! Turn them lamps off me! You'll blind me! ‘Where’re your, specs? Better put ’em on, or I’m liable to get primitive! And say, what have you done to your hair?”

“Nothing—but turn it loose!” Ruth laughed. ae really too long to be worn as a bob, but—”

“But gosh! You didn’t have to slick it back till sear head looked like a yellow onion,” the office boy protested, ' curiously angry with her. “I used to think your hair’d pull your eyebrows out by the roots. Say! Maybe that was’ what give you that scared rabbit look—your hair skinned back like that, pullin’ at your eyebrows, and them big yellow, horn-rimmed specs of yours, coverin’ half of your, face. But say, your skin looks diff’runt too—not pale anes sickly—”

Ruth opened the top drawer of her desk and took out’ a box of powder, which she showed him triumphantly. | “See! Rachel-tinted powder, very heavy. See how yellow, : it is? Plenty of that slapped on, and my milkmaid com-: plexion was successfully hidden. But—I’ve got to get to work, Benny! Be a good infant and get me some water for my sponge, and sharpen a bunch of pencils, won’t

ou?” .

J “Say!” Benny sputtered. “You ain’t gonna shut up and not slip me the low-down on why you done it, are you?

. To think that all this time—Gosh! I didn’t even know you had a figger!” he accused her, his eyes traveling over her beautifully dressed little body again. “You always wore them long-skirted, dark old things

“Scatter, Benny!” Ruth commanded, her cheeks very pink, her blue eyes brimming with tender mirth. “Re-' member, this is Saturday—a half holiday. I’ve something else to do than listen to you sputter ‘Gee!’ and ‘Gosh!

6 THE. BLACK.PIGEQGN down my neck. No, I’m not going to tell you why I did it! Take these pencils and put a long point on each of them, please.”

Her competent little hands began to open the big stack _ of mail. Only one Jetter marked “Personal” this morning— another of those big, square, orchid-tinted envelopes with the distinctive, angular handwriting in violet ink. The handwriting of a woman of culture and strong character, Ruth had decided long since. She wondered anew why the sight of one of them made her employer so furious. The pencil-sharpener had been grinding recklessly, but now the sound dragged, stopped altogether.

“Say, Ruth! I guess I ain’t so dumb! I know why you made up to look like a Lillian Gish slavey in specs and long dresses.”

“Clever boy!” Ruth laughed, laying aside the orchid< tinted letter, unopened of course. She was too happy te scold Benny this morning.

“You done it so’s you could keep your job!” Benny, deduced triumphantly. “You knowed—all righi! knew— that the minute ‘Handsome Harry’ lamped you he’d fall for you like a ton of bricks. Bet that’s the reason too thaf you’ve worked so many places since you got out of busi< ness college, ain’t it?”

“Benny, you’ve been meddling in my desk again!”

“Aw, I ain’t either! I just happened to see a bunch of letters of recommendation clipped together and I glanced over ’em,” Benny protested. “Say, they had me goin" sure! I couldn’t figger out why a whiz of a steno like you worked two or three weeks in a job and then had to blow, and why the guys you worked for give you such swell recommendations if they didn’t wanta keep you. I guesg they all tried to ‘make’ you, didn’t they?”

“Shut up, Benny, and get to work!” Ruth scolded, heg cheeks scarlet.

“Yes, sir, ’at’s the ticket, sure’s you’re born!” Benny, applauded his own powers of deduction. “Gosh! I can just imagine! Married man hires you—and who wouldn’t? I’m askin’ you! Wifey blows in, lamps new secretary—wham! ‘Either she goes or I go!’ wifey lays the law down. "’Nen— ‘Ym awful sorry, Miss Lester, but—er—necessary to re- - trench—do without a secretary for a while. Best of recommendations, of course—’ All ’at stuff! Am I right, fair frail?” Benny concluded, with an impudence he had never been interested enough to show her before.

Ruth’s golden head nodded slowly. Yes, Benny was right. No boy of seventeen could know how terribly accurate his slangy version of her past as a business girl was.

“Sure, ’m right! Think I'll be a detective when I get grown. I mean—” and Benny blushed violently, “now that I am grown! Guess it was just as bad when you got a job with a single man, wasn’t it, Ruth? Guess it didn’t take any guy more’n five seconds to fall in love with you, and more’n two weeks to work you out of a job if you wasn’t havin’ any, thanks. ’At right?”

“Right!” Ruth agreed. “But do shut up, Benny. If you don’t let me do my work I'll spank you.”

“Hunh!” Benny snorted. “I’d make two of you. Bet you don’t weigh mor’n ninety pounds. . . . Well, I gotta hand it to you, kid! You sure slipped something over on ‘Handsome Harry.’ No wonder you’ve stuck here for four months. Sheiks like him don’t go round fallin’ in love with girls that look Orphant Annies, dying of gallopin’ consumption.”

At that, joy flooded Ruth’s heart, and spilled out in indiscreet words. “One man did, Benny!”

The pencil-sharpener, which had begun to grind again, stopped with a jerk. “Hey! Spell that out, will you? You ain’t gone and got engaged, have you, Ruth? Or—or is it ‘Handsome Harry’?” And the boy’s freckled face turned @ sudden dull crimson. “Guess I mighta knowed that *Handsome Harry’ wasn’t missin’ nothin’—Gosh!” The Jast word was a wail of adolescent misery.

“Don’t be absurd, Benny!” Ruth cried. Then she rose, drawn to her feet by the boyish agony in Benny’s face, and went to him. She tilted his quivering chin with a forefinger and smiled shyly into his eyes. “It isn’t Mr. Borden, Benny. It’s—can you keep a secret, Benny? I’m engaged to» Mr. Hayward. It just happened last night, and oh, Benny,

I’m so happy I don’t think I can bear it!”

The boy did a surprising thing then. He seized the finger which was tilting his chin and pressed it hard against his lips, while a blush ran in crimson waves from his throat to his brow. For an instant his prominent pale gray eyes were not the eyes of an adolescent boy, but those of a man.

“Won’t you say you’re glad, Benny?” Ruth coaxed tenderly.

“Oh, sure!” the boy mumbled. “Sure ’m glad. Why not? He’s a great guy—best-lookin’ sheik in the Starbridge Building. Gee! What a swell pair you two’ll make!” He gulped back his tears manfully. “But say, Ruth, you’d better douse the glim before ‘Handsome Harry’ surges in. I’m tellin’ you—”

“Talk English for a change, Benny!” Ruth laughed. *““Douse the glim?’”

“Put on them yellow specs of yours and slick back your hair like you been wearin’ it,” the boy urged, with a curious sort of desperation. ““Honest, Ruth—”

“Mr. Borden’s affections are so thoroughly engaged at present that I don’t think we need worry,” Ruth laughed. “But to please you, Benny, I’ll revert to the ‘Lillian-Gishin-spectacles’ role.”

She was reaching into the top drawer of her desk for the big, yellow-lensed, horn-rimmed spectacles which made her blue eyes look a sickly, pale green, when the telephone rang.

“Pennsylvania 3500,” she announced. Then, after a pause during which she raised her eyebrows significantly as she glanced over her shoulder toward Benny: “No, Mr. Borden has not come in yet. . . . I don’t know. I’m sorry

- - . What name shall I say? Oh . . . Thank you!” she hung up the receiver and shrugged. “The woman with the lovely contralto voice. I wonder who she is. I put Me. Borden on the line once when she called, and he told me to remember her voice and never do it again. Some old flame, I suppose. I can’t help feeling sorry for her, though why she should want him back—”

She pushed back the telephone and was reaching for the disguising spectacles when the outer door opened and Henry P. Borden stepped into the room. Ruth swerved her chair so that her back was turned toward her employer. If only he would go right on into his private office, so that she should have time to—

“Morning, Miss Lester. Anything important?”

Borden was striding toward the door that led into his private office, not vouchsafing a look at that pallid little nonentity whose only appeal to him was that she was an incomparable secretary.

Henry P. Borden, known along Broadway as “Handsome Harry” Borden, deserved both the adjective and the slight sneer with which it was accompanied. For handsome he undoubtedly was, in a bold, striking, black-and-white way. If he had chosen the movies instead of dubious finance as a career he would inevitably have been cast as the “heavy”—the drawing-room, silk-hat type of villain. He was tall and large, but not at all fat. Sleek, thick black hair, into which forty years of self-indulgence and at least twenty-years of fast living had not introduced a single strand of white. Bold, wide, black eyes, which had a trick of staring at a woman until her heart fluttered and her cheeks went either pale or crimson—according to the purity of her heart and the type of response which “Handsome Harry’s” eyes called up in her. A stubby black mustache. Extraordinarily fair skin, for a man, despite the thick growth of beard which he shaved close twice a day. Rather thick but well-shaped red lips, always slightly moist, as if he had just run an anticipatory tongue over them. If rumor could be trusted, anticipation had nearly. always become realization for “Handsome Harry” Borden.

“Nothing very important, Mr. Borden,” Ruth answered, without turning her head. Oh, if he would only go on into his office and close the door!

But Borden paused, his hand on the knob of his door. “Any calls?”

Ruth’s hands shook a little as she adjusted her spectacles with fumbling haste. “Only one,” she answered, in her meek, timid little voice. “The woman with the beautiful contralto voice. I asked her if she would leave her name, and she said no.” She rose, gathered up the mail, the orchid-tinted letter topping the stack, and faced her employer, inwardly quaking.

“That voice may sound beautiful to you, but believe me, I'd rather listen to a riveting machine. . . . Hullo! What have you done to yourself?”

As Benny Smith had done, Harry Borden took her in, from the top of her curl-crowned head to the toes of her new snakeskin pumps. No—not quite as Benny had done, for the boy’s eyes had been clean and young and frank, while the man’s eyes were bold and suddenly calculating, after the first blankness of astonishment.

Ruth pursed her mouth, banishing the dimple and Jooking as much as possible like the mouselike little creature he had become accustomed to and had ignored. “I—it’s just these clothes, Mr. Borden. I—I saved some of my salary, and—but, please, Mr. Borden, there’s a letter from Hendrickson in Chicago. He’s sold ten thousand shares of that Nu-Gas stock, in spite of what the chemist reported—”

The potential lover vanished and the shady financier took his place. ““Hendrickson’s a fool, but a damned good stock salesman. Wire him to—”

They passed on into Borden’s private office, and as her employer gave her instructions regarding Hendrickson Ruth laid the stack of opened letters, topped with the

THE BLACK PIGEON If

_orchid-tinted “Personal” envelope, upon the immaculate » green blotter of the flat-topped brown walnut desk. Be- _ fore she reached her chair on the opposite side of the desk Borden flipped the orchid letter aside, with a muttered - oath, then picked it up and thrust it, with an angry gesture, into the breast pocket of his vest.

“T wonder if he ever answers one of those letters, and why she keeps.on writing him if he doesn’t,” Ruth reflected, then looked up from her notebook to find her employer’s eyes regarding her quizzically, calculatingly.

“Little Miss Cinderella in person!” he chuckled. ‘Funny ane a permament wave and a box of rouge will do fora gir hee

“Yes, Mr. Borden,” Ruth answered meekly. “There’s am urgent letter from Nathan in Los Angeles. He’s demanding a larger commission on Bakersfield Oil, since the new field is failing. What shall I write him?”

Borden consented to be lured into dictation. His manner instantly became sharp, incisive, his words rapid, but Ruth wrote happily. Thank God, he wasn’t going to annoy eee

“Write me out a check for five hundred cash,” the promoter said at last, flinging his personal check book across the desk to her. “And go to the bank yourself, won’t you? Then stop at Penn station and get me a drawing-room and two round-trip tickets for Winter Heaven—train leaving at 2:15 this afternoon. Wire the Hotel Winter Heaven for a suite—best in the house. Reserve the rooms in the name of Mr. and Mrs. H. P.—let’s see—what other surname begins with a B, so the initials on my luggage will match?”

“Benton?” Ruth suggested, in a small, innocent voice.

‘All right. But make a note of it on the ticket envelope fer me, please. I was in Atlantic City one time with a temporary missus, and forgot our name. It was damned awkward. ‘Mr. and Mrs. H. P. Benton,’ eh? Good enough,” he chuckled. ‘Guess who Mrs. Benton will be, Cinderella.”

“JJ think I’d better not know, don’t you, Mr. Bora’ den?” Ruth answered timidly. “Here’s the check. Will you sign it, please, and I'll go to the bank right away, before it’s jammed.” pod |

“Little prunes-and-prisms!” Borden laughed, grasping the small hand which extended the check. “You know, something?—I believe you’ve been stringing me! I don’t think you’re half the timid little rabbit you’ve been pretending to be.” He drew hard on her hand, so that Ruth’s small body was strained against the desk. “Come on! Let’s” see how you really look. Take off those hideous spectacles and let me see your eyes—” aT

“Please, Mr. Borden!” Ruth gasped. “I—I can’t see with out them. My eyes are so weak. And—and they blink with< out my glasses,” she lied desperately.

It was Benny who ended the scene, a stormy-faced, sullen Benny who jerked open the door as if he had been listening at the keyhole.

“What the devil—?” Borden began furiously. “Have you forgotten how to knock?”

Benny swung the door shut and slouched against it, sullenly defiant. ““There’s a guy out there wantin’ to see you. Says him and his wife’s been gypped outa their life savin’s—”

Borden stared at the boy as if he thought Benny had suddenly gone crazy. Then the dark blood of anger stained his peculiarly white skin. ““Get the hell out of here, or I'll shake your teeth down your throat! And get rid of that man, whoever he is. You know damned well I never see a person of that sort. . . . Wait! You’d better handle hint yourself, Miss Lester. Here! Don’t forget the check. Five hundred in tens and twenties, please. Here’s a fifty to get the drawing-room and railroad tickets. I want to have af least five hundred in ready cash, and this fifty is too big a bill anyway.”

The promoter had drawn a handsome brown leatheg wallet from his pocket, and as he extracted the fifty dollag banknote, Ruth caught a glimpse of another yellow-backed bill, but did not see its denomination. It might be a hundred or even a five-hundred-dollar note, Ruth knew, for “Handsome Harry,” playboy of Broadway, loved to flash golden-tinted bills before the dazzled eyes of headwaiters. ~ Later, a harsh-voiced, flinty-eyed detective would be demanding of Ruth Lester a minutely detailed recital of every event of that Saturday morning, expecting prodigious feats of memory of her. Then, everything would be of importance, for murder would have made them so. But now nothing seemed important to Ruth Lester but that she was free to leave Harry Borden’s private office, free to close the door upon his staring, bold, greedy, black eyes.

- Not even the old man who was tremulously reiterating his story of terrible and crushing financial loss through one of Borden’s fake stock schemes seemed important to her then. She eased him out of the office as gently as possible, her ears almost deaf to his muttered threats of vengeance against Henry P. Borden. She had listened to many such stories, heard many versions of the old man’s bitter prayer that God should make Harry Borden pay with his life for his sins. But as she hurried into her fur coat and jaunty little felt hat, her heart was singing again, her joy not touched by the slightest hint of premonition that those prayers would be answered so soon and so horribly.

It was half past ten o’clock. In less than three hours she would join Jack Hayward at the elevator, go to lunch with him to celebrate the engagement which had taken place last night. The miracle of it! He had loved her before he knew she looked like—this! And Ruth smiled at her own reflected beauty, thoroughly appreciated by herself for the first time.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Benny demanded in a furious whisper. His freckled face was very pale, his hands clenched. “Didn’t take him ten minutes to begin pawin’ you, the dirty—”

- “Hush, Benny!” Ruth interrupted, with an apprehensive glance toward the private office. “I can take care of myself.”

As she left the office to fulfill her employer’s commissions ‘she was smiling a little at the office boy’s sudden infatuation, so like, and yet so different from the greedy interest that had sprung into the bold black eyes of “Handsome Harry” Borden.

CHAPTER If I

ICKY MORAN, the jolly, impudent, red-headed Irish boy who was lord of the elevator directly across the hall from the Borden offices, did not recognize in the pink-and-white-and-gold little beauty the timid secretary who had been a daily, mouse-quiet passenger of his for the last four months. His bold eyes took her in at a glance, then he began to whistle significantly: “Yes, sir, that’s my baby!”

Just before the elevator reached the ground floor Ruth Lester asked, in the hesitant, meek voice which had been part of her “disguise”: “Is your father recovering from that awful automobile accident, Micky?”

Before the astonished boy could reply, Ruth, laughing at him over her furred shoulder, stepped into the lobby of the Starbridge Building.

“Vain little imp!” she characterized herself, as a gust of January wind tugged at her coat. “But oh, I’m so glad I can be me at last. Four months of being some one else! But worth it, worth it, worth it!” she chanted under her breath, as she joined the Saturday morning shoppers who milled about the busy corner—Thirty-Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue.

It was uncanny how accurately Benny Smith had diagnosed the absurd situation which had made a disguise necessary. Perfect blond beauty had been a pleasant possession, so long as her father had been alive to shield her. Ruth had been as proud of him as he of her, for Colby Lester had been one of the greatest criminal lawyers in

New York—a criminal lawyer whose greatness lay in his keenness as a detective rather than in jury-swaying oratory. During the last five years of his life Colby Lester had talked over all his cases with his daughter. Many a night they had sat up until dawn, Ruth curled kitten-wise in his arms, her childish brows knit, amusingly, in the same fashion as his, her logical mind keeping pace with his and sometimes leaping ahead of it.

“Good work, Infant! You’ve got the makings of a Grade A detective under those yellow. curls. But, please God, you'll never have to earn your living in any such sordid fashion as this,” he had told her once, when she had pounced upon the missing link in a chain of evidence which was to acquit a man of murder.

A dignified home, exquisite clothes, private school, association with keen and cultured minds—ail these things Ruth had enjoyed until Colby Lester’s sudden, tragic death. He had been defending a woman on the charge of poisoning her lover, a married man, and had been shot down by the grief-and-jealousy-crazed widow of the victim, because she had believed that Colby Lester would win the defendant’s freedom for her. And he had, although his funeral took place while the jury was bringing in its just verdict of “Not guilty.”

Even now Ruth could scarcely understand why there had been so little for her when her father’s estate was settled. But his books showed that he had defended more penniless victims of tragic circumstance than wealthy ones, because their cases presented problems which intrigued his detective instincts. And he had been a connoisseur of comfortable living, had thought he could always make enough money to gratify the exquisite tastes he had cultivated in himself and his daughter. And then he had died... .

Ruth Lester shivered, but not because a high January wind was whipping about her slender legs. She mustn’t think about her father’s death now. She was happy again, and he would be happy, too, at last. For Ruth had had the feeling all through the two years since her father’s death that Colby Lester was wandering about, an earthbound spirit, stricken with remorse that he was not able to protect her from the wolves who wanted to gobble her up.

She had used what little money there was to take an eight months’ secretarial course, and had come out of the Miller Business College primed with all sorts of useful knowledge, her fingers capable of astonishing speed in shorthand and typing. Her only desire had been to become? an expert secretary and to earn a decent living by her work. But men had not let her do it. Apparently no man could look at her without wanting to touch her. She had had to flee, from this job to that, from one humiliating experience to another. As Benny Smith, the office boy, had guessed, the wives of the married men she had tried to work for had been the worst. . . . But those scenes would not bear thinking of now, when she was so happy... .

It was a motion picture, finally, which pointed a way out of her difficulty. Out of work, having had ten jobs in eight months, she had gone forlornly into a movie theater in an effort to forget her rather absurd troubles. And she had seen, on a screen, a timid, mousy little secretary with skinned-back hair, ill-fitting clothes and horn-rimmed spectacles, suddenly transform herself into a beauty, so that she might win the love of her employer.