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Now Tode had in mind all day a burning desire to tell Dora that he had made all the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, just twenty-six times on twenty-six old envelopes that he had gathered together from various waste-baskets, and could "make every one of 'em to a dot." But instead of all this he said: "Say, do you believe all this queer talk?" "What do you mean, Tode?"
Girls were continually going into innocent gales of mirth because long-lost bills were discovered, shut in some old ledger, or rushing awe-struck to Miss Thornton with accounts of others that had been carried away in waste-baskets and burned. "Sh-sh! Don't make such a fuss," Miss Thornton would say warningly, with a glance toward Mr. Brauer's office. "Perhaps he'll never ask for them!"
"Yes," it cried, "when that day is the twenty-first of December!" That let pandemonium loose again, wilder, madder than before. A member threw a pamphlet at Uncle Billy. In a moment the air was thick with a Brobdingnagian snow-storm: pamphlets, huge wads of foolscap, bills, books, newspapers, waste-baskets went flying at the grotesque target from every quarter of the room.
The rooms were littered with torn papers; waste-baskets overflowing; looking silent, scrappy, and abandoned in the grey morning light which seemed intrusive, usurping the place of the usual artificial illumination, and betraying a bareness which the other concealed. Jennie recognized a relationship between her own up-all-night feeling and the spirit of the deserted rooms.
I spent a good part of it getting behind something to conceal my silent laughter. If you had been here you would have enjoyed it and her. I knew something was as it should not be when I saw her pushing the little wheelbarrow on which were all my waste-baskets I have needed them. But when I got them back, it about finished my attempts at sobriety.
Garbage cans and waste-baskets were made to take care of these things. Tidiness is worth more to a business man than most of them realize. In the first place it gives a favorable impression to a person coming in from the outside, and, in the second place, it helps those on the inside to keep things straight.
From the light Poh! which we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler's impertinences into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterance which comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a space of some three or four inches. Words, which are a set of clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to tones and expression of the features.
Wilkins for those blame waste-baskets!" Mrs. Esther Lawrence was, she said, bored by the general atmosphere of innocent and bounding girlhood at the Temperance Home Club, and she persuaded Una to join her in taking a flat three small rooms which they made attractive with Japanese toweling and Russian, or at least Russian-Jew, brassware. Here Mrs. Lawrence's men came calling, and sometimes Mr.
Desks, filing-cabinets, mimeographs, adding-machines, card indexes, desk calendars, telephone-extensions, adjustable desk-lights. Wire correspondence-baskets, erasers, carbon paper, type-brushes, dust-rags, waste-baskets. Pencils, hard and soft, black and blue and red. Pens, pen-points, backing-sheets, note-books, paper-clips.
The whole hamlet smells of it this minute. I had a small-sized fit of hysterics after she had gone, and it was not cured by opening up my waste-baskets and laying out the "treasures" she had saved for me. I laughed until I cried. There were my bouillion cups, and no saucers. The saucers were piled in the buffet.
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