Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 28, 2025
They're very nice people, but they can't talk," said Una to Bessie Kraker, at lunch in the office, on a February day. "How do yuh mean 'can't talk'? Are they dummies?" inquired Bessie. "Dummies?" "Yuh, sure, deef and dumb." "Why, no, I mean they don't talk my language they don't, oh, they don't, I suppose you'd say 'conversationalize. Do you see?" "Oh yes," said Bessie, doubtfully.
Wilkins, directing her to take charge of the office, of Bessie Kraker, and the office-boy, and the negotiations with the Comfy Coast Building and Development Company regarding the planning of three rows of semi-detached villas.
Una, an errand-boy, and a young East-Side Jewish stenographer named Bessie Kraker made up the office force of Troy Wilkins. The office was on the eighth floor of the Septimus Building, which is a lean, jerry-built, flashingly pretentious cement structure with cracking walls and dirty, tiled hallways.
He promised to "think it over." He was still taking a few months to think it over while her Saturday pay-envelope remained as thin as ever when Bessie Kraker resigned, to marry a mattress-renovator, and in Bessie's place Mr. Wilkins engaged a tall, beautiful blonde, who was too much of a lady to take orders from Una. This wrecked Una's little office home, and she was inspired to write to Mr.
Bessie Kraker had insisted, with the nonchalant shrillness of eighteen, that Una "had ought to wear more color"; and Una had found, in the fashion section of a woman's magazine, the suggestion for exactly the thing "a modest, attractive frock of brown, with smart touches of orange" and economical.
I'm not in any way urging you to stay, you understand, but I don't like to see you making a mistake." But he had also told Bessie Kraker that she was "making a mistake" when she had resigned to be married, and he had been so very certain that Una could never be "worth more" than fifteen. Una was rather tart about it. Though Mr. Ross didn't want her at Pemberton's for two weeks more, she told Mr.
Wilkins also knew Una's faults her habit of falling a-dreaming at 3.30 and trying to make it up by working furiously at 4.30; her habit of awing the good-hearted Bessie Kraker by posing as a nun who had never been kissed nor ever wanted to be; her graft of sending the office-boy out for ten-cent boxes of cocoanut candy; and a certain resentful touchiness and ladylikeness which made it hard to give her necessary orders.
In the other room there were the correspondence-files, and the desks of Una, the chief stenographer, and of slangy East-Side Bessie Kraker, who conscientiously copied form-letters, including all errors in them, and couldn't, as Wilkins complainingly pointed out, be trusted with dictation which included any words more difficult than "sincerely."
Twelve o'clock, the hour at which most of the offices closed on Saturday in summer, was excitedly approaching. The office-women throughout the Septimus Building, who had been showing off their holiday frocks all morning, were hastily finishing letters, or rushing to the women's wash-rooms to discuss with one another the hang of new skirts. All morning Bessie Kraker had kept up a monologue, beginning, "Say, lis-ten, Miss Golden, say, gee! I was goin' down to South Beach with my gentleman friend this afternoon, and, say, what d'you think the piker had to go and get stuck for? He's got to work all afternoon. I don't care I don't care! I'm going to Coney Island with Sadie, and I bet you we pick up some fellows and do the light fantastic till one G.
Otherwise the whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ignoble motives of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a mattress-renovator, and Bessie's successor; of fifteen dollars a week, and everybody trying to deceive everybody else; of vague reasons for going, and vaguer reasons for letting Una go, and no reason at all for her remaining; in all, an ascent from a scrub-rag to a glorified soap-factory designed to provide Mr.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking