Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 69).djvu/33

BEAUTY in distress is always a pathetic spectacle, and rarely can any maiden have been more beautiful or more pathetic than Sylvia Harlow, who had just been fired from the Nelson Underwear Company, of 191, Fore Street, London, E.C.2. It was not her fault. Ever since she left the Cosmopolitan Business College in Chancery Lane she had acted as typist-stenographer to Mr. Wordie, who usually described her as his secretary. And now, at the ripe age of twenty, after three years of strenuous service, she had been flung out upon the cold, cold world. So had Mr. Wordie, with a wife and five children. Truth to tell, he had been more interested in golf than in the business, and so the directors had decided to make a change; indeed, they had concluded that Mr. Wordie with a half-year's salary in his pocket and out of the business was far more profitable than Mr. Wordie at his desk and working out his time. Sylvia Harlow was given but four weeks' wages, and as the new man who took Mr. Wordie's place had his own stenographer, a useful creature in blue serge, poor Sylvia, at the time we meet her, was out of a job and looking hard. Mr. Wordie had promised to do what he could for her, and when he found something himsell no other secretary but Sylvia would serve, and he also gave her a testimonial in writing which declared her a model and a pattern of waat a stenographer should be. But so far nobody had offered her a job, and twice she had been told by severe and bearded citizens that she was "too good-looking and too well-dressed."

In any rational and civilized society Sylvia would not have had to look for jobs. So beautiful and charming a girl would have had the choice of umpteen husbands. But in Europe, after the war, with all the good men gone and the old men married, there remained very little but the bloated sons of profiteers, the poverty-stricken ex-soldier trying hard to catch up with five lost years, or those decayed lounge-lizards, highbrow geniuses, and dancing-floor heroes who had taken shelter from the storm. And Sylvia wanted none of these; in short, she didn't know what she did want, except that she must find another job. And that promptly.

Her money was giving out and her shoes were wearing out when she called at the offices of Messrs. Whiteman, French, and Company, wholesale tobacco merchants and manufacturers, of Peacock's Lane, Walworth, S.E.17, and asked to sce Mr. Lewis Whiteman.

It had come about in this way. She had already applied for seventeen jobs without any luck and had been turned down at the eighteenth. The man, however, had looked her over, and, calling her back, "I thay, mith," he had shouted, with a horrible lisp, "I think if you go to Whiteman, French, and Co., the tobacco people in Walworth, and ask for Mr. Lewith Whiteman, he may be able to give you a job. Give him my card, and if you wait a moment I'll write it down."