Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman Part 7

Josie minced off with a good deal of hip movement according to the fas.h.i.+on of the day.

"I'd like to wear run-down heels, but I can't afford to ruin my feet. I have a pair of fancy blue and gray shoes I got at a second-hand shop and I'll put those on for dress occasions, but I'll have to wear my own decently sensible shoes when I am at work. I am going to be in town for a few days yet, but won't be staying here but at a swell third-cla.s.s boarding house on Centre Street. If I should come in here and you have customers do you think you can keep straight faces?"

"We'll try!" giggled the partners.

"Here comes somebody now," cried Elizabeth. "You'd better hide!"

But there was no time to hide. The visitors turned out to be Mrs.

Wright and a Mrs. Hasbrook, a rich woman who had recently moved to Dorfield, and according to Mrs. Wright's custom she had been among the first to call on the newcomer and now had her in tow telling her where to buy and what to buy. She had conducted her to the Higgledy-Piggledy Shop as a place where her fine damask could be laundered well. Mrs.

Wright had recovered from her mortification over Elizabeth's engaging in this strange occupation and now that the shop was proving so successful and so fas.h.i.+onable she was not only reconciled but very proud of her daughter's connection with it and she took every opportunity to come to the shop and to bring others there.

"Where is Miss O'Gorman?" demanded Mrs. Wright. "I want Mrs. Hasbrook to talk with her concerning this work."

"She is not in," faltered Elizabeth.

"Not in! I saw her come in not half an hour ago. Mrs. Hasbrook was having a shampoo just across the street and I certainly saw Miss O'Gorman enter the building and I have not seen her depart."

Elizabeth looked hopeless under this relentless questioning of her determined parent. She turned to Josie for help. Josie arose to the occasion with such spirit that Mary Louise and Irene were taken completely off their guard and almost exploded with laughter. With a lisping drawl and a voice none of her friends had ever heard before Josie said:

"You were going to show me one of those vanity boxes. Miss O'Gorman told me you had some for seven dollars. I met her at the corner about five minutes ago."

"Oh, you did?" asked Mrs. Wright. "Well, I fancy I must have looked another way for a moment." She glanced curiously at Josie, who returned her stare with the utmost composure.

Elizabeth opened a drawer of vanity boxes and Josie crossed the room to inspect them with an exaggerated walk which reminded Mary Louise of a movie vamp. Again she was moved to laughter and had to pretend to sneeze.

"I am afraid you have caught cold," said Mrs. Wright. "You must take five grains of aspirin and go to bed. Follow it up with a dose of aromatic spirits of ammonia and let your diet be light."

Mary Louise listened politely and Josie made her escape with her suitcase without purchasing the vanity box.

CHAPTER VII JOSIE GETS A JOB

When Josie left the Higgledy-Piggledy Shop, after having hoodwinked Mrs. Wright, she made her way to a small hotel much favored by traveling men. It was the address given by a man who wished to employ a number of young women to travel in the South to introduce a line of household articles as well as some jewel novelties.

"What experience have you had?" the man asked her.

"Plenty of it," Josie answered with a.s.surance. "I tell you, mister, I can sell anything from a baby's rattle to a tombstone. You can ask the girls who run the Higgledy-Piggledy Shop here in Dorfield. Ever hear of them?"

"Sure!"

"Well, I have a letter here from Miss Josie O'Gorman, who is chief cook and bottle washer 'round there and she will tell you that I am a winner. I tell you Mrs. Danny Dexter and Miss O'Gorman think old Sally Blossom is a peacherino."

The man took the letter, which was written on Higgledy-Piggledy paper and in Josie's best handwriting. In it the cleverness of Miss Sally Blossom was lauded to the skies. Josie blushed through her paint as he read it aloud.

"To think of my having the nerve to say all that about myself!" flashed through her mind. "But I bet it lands me my job."

It did. Since she was the first to apply she was given her choice of a field of operations and she chose Atlanta. She gave her address as 126 East Centre and made an engagement with the man to see him the next day to receive instructions and literature concerning her wares. Samples were to be sent to her at Atlanta.

"Now, having given my address as 126 East Centre, I must hurry over there and apply for board," said Josie to herself as she left the hotel.

The group gathered on the porch at 126 East Centre was the same as it had been on the day that Josie had tracked the elusive d.i.n.k to her lair. The young men were tilted back in their chairs at the same angle, and the young women were equally taken up with their ear puffs and frizzes. The clientele of 126 was an ever-changing one, but the cla.s.s characteristics were stationary.

Josie tripped up the steps, a.s.suming a kind of nonchalance as she calmly viewed the loafing boarders. They in turn gazed at her, some with interest and some with open disdain. With the boarders at 126 one must prove herself down to their standards before being accepted into their social order.

"Stuck up!" declared one young woman--the one with the most extreme ear puffs of all, the shortest skirt and the highest heels.

"Oh, I don't know," objected a man, removing the toothpick from his mouth and his gaudily socked feet from the railing. "I think she's some cutey."

A snicker of derision answered this sally.

"With them unstylish low heels? I guess you ain't got below her henna bob," snapped the girl, arching her instep and poking out her near-silk clad foot with its high-heeled, dirty, white kid pump.

Josie pulled the bell. It was the old-fas.h.i.+oned kind that must be pulled not pushed. When it was in working order a pull would set a wire in motion through the length of the house to the back entry and there a bell attached to the wire would start such a jangling that someone would come to the front door. This happened when the bell was in order, which was seldom the case at 126. When Josie gave a tug, which was vigorous and somewhat vicious from the embarra.s.sment she could but feel at the overheard remarks, the bell handle with a coil of broken wire spring came limply away, and it was nothing but Josie's training that kept her ever on the alert that saved her from falling backwards.

"April fool!" called a grinning youth from the porch.

Josie laughed good-naturedly at her prospective fellow-boarder.

"Anyhow I know how not to get in," she said.

"'Tain't any trouble to get in this joint," ventured a woman. "There's more goin' than comin'. I'll never send a dog here."

"Oh, 'tain't so bad considering the H. C. of L.," put in a middle-aged man in a very tight Shepherd's plaid suit. "Mrs. Pete feeds us the best she can for the mon."

"Oh, you're sweet on Mrs. Pete," laugheed the youth who had called "April fool" to Josie.

"Is Mrs. Pete at home?" asked Josie, glad to know the name of her future landlady.

"Sure she's home! Just open the door and walk in. Follow your nose-- there's cabbage to-day so it's easy--right down the hall until you come to some steps. Then fall down the steps to the dining room. If Mrs.

Pete ain't there she's in the kitchen next to it."

Josie thanked the youth and followed his advice. She found everything as he had told her she would, even to Mrs. Pete in the kitchen. She was hardly prepared for the knock-down odors which greeted her nostrils as she fell down the steps, nor was she prepared for the appearance of Mrs. Pete.

Josie's first thought was: "How does the woman ever get down those narrow stairs?" but she realized afterwards that she was of the soft type of fat that could be squeezed into any s.p.a.ce. She was bursting from a tight kimono, a garment usually the loosest of all apparel, but Mrs. Pete's arms quite filled the flowing sleeves and although it was drawn tightly around her huge hips the fronts refused to meet but took on the slant of a cutaway coat. There was no expression to her face. It was simply fat. Her eyes looked like raisins in a bun and her mouth had almost disappeared. One tooth projected as though nature had decided that would be the only way to save the mouth from being entirely submerged. Her nose would have been lost had it not been for a wart.

She moved lightly and easily, reminding Josie of a balloon with not enough gas in it to soar aloft. She wore a black wig at a rakish angle and a string of huge pink beads were lost and found in the folds of fat of her neck.

"Well?" she questioned Josie in a voice that sounded as though she were speaking down an empty hogshead.

"I want a room and board," said Josie.

"How many in a room?"

"I'd like one to myself."

"Humph! You'll have to pay for it then."

Josie expressed her willingness and they soon came to terms.