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It was a cold shock to have to stand waiting behind Babson while he rummaged in his roll-top desk and apparently tried to pull out his hair. He looked back at her and blurted, "Oh! You, Miss Golden? They said you'd take some dictation. Chase those blue-prints off that chair and sit down. Be ready in a sec."
Especially the personality of Walter Babson. §
Two days later Una heard Babson come out and lament that the managing editor didn't like his masterpiece and was going to use the Kells Karburetor Kompany's original write-up. "That's what you get when you try to give the Gas-bag some literary flavor don't appreciate it!"
The editor's brows made a V at her report, and he grunted, "Well " For two days, till Walter Babson returned, she never failed to look up when the outer door of the office opened. She found herself immensely interested in trying to discover, from her low plane as copyist, just what sort of a position Walter Babson occupied up among the select souls. Nor was it very difficult.
Nevertheless, he kept doing things to 'brace the town up, as he put it. The town needed it. It was about bankrupt. The fire department was a joke, the waterworks a farce, and the town hall a ruin. Babson thought this gave him a chance to put his name on the map.
With her small head erect, her narrow shoulders thrown back, and with a resolute step as befitted the descendant of a long line of ancestors Miss Althea passed behind the jury box and disappeared. The twelve looked at one another dubiously. Both Babson and O'Brien seemed nervous and undecided. "Well, call your next witness," remarked the judge finally.
Una discovered that the owner and the managing editor did not regard Walter Babson as a permanent prop of the institution; that they would keep him, at his present salary of twenty-five dollars a week, only till some one happened in who would do the same work for less money.
"About two hours, Your Honor," he replied. The jury stirred impatiently. It was clear that they regarded a two-hour speech from him under the circumstances as an imposition. But Babson wished to preserve the fiction of impartiality. "Very well," said he. "You may sum up until four-thirty, and have half an hour more to-morrow morning. See that the doors are closed, Captain Phelan.
Meanwhile they make their livings as sub-editors on trade journals, as charity-workers, or as assistants to illiterate literary agents. To this slum of literature Walter Babson belonged.
Mamie Magen was the most highly evolved person Una had ever known. Una had, from books and newspapers and Walter Babson, learned that there were such things as socialists and earnest pessimists, and the race sketchily called "Bohemians" writers and artists and social workers, who drank claret and made love and talked about the free theater, all on behalf of the brotherhood of man.
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