When little Emma Hooper, from Black Plains, Iowa, came to Chicago to
carve out her fortune, she did not leave behind her a sorrowing family
who wondered about the fate of their dear child in the city. Neither
did she sneak away from a cruel step-mother who had made life hard,
unbearable. Emma’s family was quite glad to see her go.
Emma’s father was a member of the Knights of Pythias and worked in an
overall factory. Her mother, a lazy, whiny woman, kept house, assisted
unwillingly and incompetently by such daughters of the house as
happened to be out of work. There were three of these daughters besides
Emma and they all worked when jobs were not too difficult to get or
keep. They spent their spare time trying to get married. There was one
son. He was next in age to Emma, who was the second youngest. He smoked
cheap cigars and hung around the livery stable and garage. His name was
Ralph.
Emma came up to Chicago because she had read and heard a lot about that
great city, and because she wanted to get away from Black Plains. She
wanted to have a good time. There was nothing doing in Black Plains,
and she knew it. She didn’t belong to “the crowd,” as fashionable
society was called there, for she lacked both money and family. She was
twenty-two and had gone with the drummers who stayed at the Palace
Hotel since she was seventeen.
Emma had been wanting to come to Chicago for a long time, but she
didn’t have the money. She had been graduated from grade school and
finished at the Black Plains Business College. Her father liked to
refer to the fact but good jobs were few in Black Plains, and Emma
had not mastered the details of her profession, such as spelling and
punctuation, and so she never could save much.
Emma’s money came rather unexpectedly. Clarence Avery got home from
college. He was the banker’s son and had gone to grade school with
Emma. At that time he had suffered from numerous colds in the head
and was inclined to lankiness and freckles. At twenty-two he was the
average small-town college graduate. Clarence belonged to the local
society crowd, but after several years of metropolitan living he was
bored and disappointed with the gaieties of Black Plains. When he met
Emma on the street one day he was agreeably surprised. Emma was small
and had dark hair that curled naturally and she knew how to do it
up. She and her sisters read the fashion magazines and ordered their
clothes from a Chicago mail-order house. She wasn’t afraid of a bit of
rouge or an eyebrow pencil, either, and she had a neat little figure.
“Hello,” said Clarence, “aren’t you—why, you couldn’t be little Emma
Hooper!”
“Well, I just am,” said Emma, and they stood and talked for a long time.
Then Clarence began to call and, disobeying all of the rules of Black
Plains society, he escorted Emma to the Airdrome and the movies and the
most prominent ice cream parlour. This worried Avery, the banker. After
he had argued with Clarence with no apparent success, he asked Emma
to call at the bank. There he had made a proposition to her. If Miss
Hooper would leave town, over the winter, say, a check for five hundred
dollars would belong to her. It was all right, of course, he knew she
was a nice girl, not a bit of harm meant or anything like that, but
Clarence was young, oh, a fine boy, but young, and if Miss Hooper, now—
So Emma had five hundred dollars. She didn’t like Clarence much,
anyhow. He was a silly, conceited thing, who told long tales about
himself, and hadn’t changed much, in fact, since his sniffy boyhood
days.
The Hoopers rejoiced in Emma’s luck, gave her advice about spending the
money and called her a selfish thing, so she gave one hundred dollars
to the girls, and then with the rest and a promise to write all about
the new styles—Millie, the oldest, had nearly captured a drummer who
travelled out of Kansas City—she came up to Chicago.
On the train she figured it all out. Country girls were always
important in a large city. She knew that. Didn’t she read about them
in the magazines every day? Always “the girl from the country,” sought
after, betrayed. Huh! But it sounded interesting, anyway.
“For I’m rather good-looking,” mused Emma, modestly, “and if some
country girl has got to be betrayed, it might as well be me. I’ll read
the want-ads like the rest and apply for a job where they want girls
fresh from the country. I’ll try to get a job with one of those nice,
grey-haired old papas, who has a wife that misunderstands him, and some
day he’ll take me out to dinner, and, well, of course, Clarence wasn’t
a real conquest, that old thing, but if I can’t find a nice old geezer,
well, something is the matter with this girl from the country stuff,
that’s all.”
As the train neared Chicago, a travelling man got on and sat down
beside Emma. He tried to flirt with her. He asked her where she came
from, and when she said Iowa, he said, “Oh, forget that stuff, kid; you
haven’t been out of Chi a week.” She wondered why he said it, but it
rather pleased her. She and her sisters had rather thought that they
kept up with things, watching the fashion books and the movies, but she
had been awfully afraid she would look like a rube. She resented the
travelling man, though. What kind of a fish did he think she was? Why,
even in Black Plains she wouldn’t have flirted with a cheap thing like
him. He even held one hand over his wedding ring. You couldn’t put a
thing like that over Emma.
At seven o’clock Emma landed in the city. The lights and noises
confused her for a minute, but she liked them then—it was like a
carnival. She didn’t see a policeman, so she went up to a fairly
respectable-looking man and asked where the Y. W. C. A. was. She knew
about that and had decided to stay there until she had time to look
around. The man looked at her and smiled. “Come, now, girlie, you don’t
want to go there,” he said, “you and I’ll have something to eat and
then I’ll show you a nice place to stay.”
“Can you beat it?” said Emma, as she went on, with a toss of her head.
“Do they really get away with that stuff in the city? Regular movie
stuff. Can you beat it?”
She finally found the Y. W. C. A. answered a number of questions
drawled out by a peevish fat woman, and was given a room.
Emma spent two weeks looking around. She visited all of the department
stores and watched people. Then she took an inventory of her clothes.
They looked better than she had expected. She’d spy around a bit before
getting any new clothes. By putting her hat a bit more over her right
ear and pulling her hair down over her forehead, she felt she could
look as good as the next one.
She went to matinées and discovered restaurants and hotels and tea
rooms and little things to wear. She sent home hideously-coloured
postcards, saying what a fine time she was having, and sent each of the
girls a waist and her mother a pocketbook. She got tired of the Y. W.
C. A. and found a nice, quiet, inexpensive room on the North Side. She
liked the city.
She flirted with one man in a tea room, but that was all. She didn’t
like that sort of thing. She was looking for the old millionaire whose
wife didn’t understand him and who liked little girls from the country.
Finally, she found that her money was beginning to disappear. By this
time she knew the city pretty well, and so she began to look for a
position in real earnest. “They all like ’em from the country,” she
told herself. She answered want-ads, those that asked for “young,
inexperienced girls.” Maybe that was the kind the rich old men put in.
They sounded that way.
Emma did not meet with much success. Usually, the place was filled when
she went to apply for it. Other times, men with wearied, blank faces
asked her questions—but nothing ever came of it.
For several weeks she looked for a position, somewhat carelessly at
first, later with hard earnestness. Was it possible that there were
no millionaires hunting for little girls, no positions even? For a
week she had a job in a dirty, poorly-ventilated office, where the
proprietor chewed tobacco. It was some sort of a fake insurance place.
She was fired at the end of the week, but she would have quit anyhow.
She looked again. It was a tiresome job. She still had over a hundred
dollars. “Not a millionaire in sight!” she sighed, as she went to bed.
“These magazines are sure putting it over people.”
Then she applied for positions by mail. She said she was all alone in
the city, from Iowa. She had more luck. Over half of her letters were
answered, but, though she was given interviews, she wasn’t given a job.
One man, tall, lean, sneering, looked at her for a long time.
“What made you say you were from the country?” he asked.
“I am,” said Emma, “Iowa.”
“Iowa. Hell!” said the man. “One look is enough to show that the White
City is the nearest the country you’ve ever been.”
The White City is a summer amusement park, but Emma didn’t even know
it. But she had got a hint at the truth.
A week later she met Hallie Summers. They were both applying for the
same position—“expert stenographer.” Hallie was correctly tailored,
perfectly groomed. Her black suit had a bit of fur at the throat, her
hat was a smart rough felt, trimmed with a single wing. Her white
buckskin gloves were immaculate, her shoes absolutely correct.
Emma gave her name and answered the usual questions. Hallie listened.
She was next. As Emma waited for the elevator, Hallie joined her.
“What,” asked Hallie, “is that gag you pulled about being from Iowa?”
Emma smiled. She liked the looks of Hallie, straight haired, correct
looking.
“That,” said Emma, “was the honest truth. I am from Iowa and I don’t
care who knows it. I don’t know a soul in town but a girl I roomed
with in the ‘Y. W.’ She wears cotton stockings and is studying to be a
milliner. Why?”
“Well,” said Hallie, as she led the way into the elevator, “if that’s
the truth or if it’s a stall, you’re the worst imitation of a country
girl I ever saw.”
“Meaning what?”
“Why, meaning, of course, my dear child, that you don’t look the part.
Where did you get those clothes, west side of State Street?”
“Iowa, but they are what most people up here are wearing.”
Emma had on a blue and white striped silk, trimmed with a touch of
green and she liked it.
“Sure,” said Hallie, “that’s what’s the matter with them.”
“I don’t quite get you,” said Emma.
Hallie smiled.
“You poor thing,” she said, “I believe you really don’t, at that. Come
up to the Clover Tea and I’ll buy a sandwich, though I’m not usually
that kind of a philanthropist, and we’ll talk it over.”
Hallie ordered tea and sandwiches and the girls talked. The only girls
Emma had talked to in Chicago had been cheap and slow and stupid. She
liked Hallie. Hallie was old, that indefinite age around thirty, and
she was wise—next to things. She knew Chicago—the way she wanted to
know it. She, too, was, in a way, looking for a millionaire, though she
had found one and lost him again.
The two girls talked. In five minutes they had bridged the distances
more formal people would have spent years over. Emma knew all about
Hallie, who wanted sixty dollars a week—and sometimes got it, and
Hallie knew about Clarence and the five hundred dollars and the rich
old papa who hadn’t appeared.
“Now what’s the matter with my looks?” asked Emma.
“It’s because there isn’t, in a way,” said Hallie. “You look like the
average stenographer, the twenty-dollar-a-week kind, that’s all. Your
clothes are cheap and they are almost in style. Look at all those bits
of velvet and buttons.”
“It said in the catalogue,” said Emma, “that it was the latest thing.
I’ve seen several in this very pattern here.”
“Sure you have. That’s why you oughtn’t to wear it. You may not know
it, but people in cities have ideas about how country girls should
look, though Heaven knows, they don’t look that way. They think that
country girls wear ginghams and never know that styles change. You
can’t wear a sunbonnet very well in the city, but if you want to
get away with the country girl stuff you can wear plain things and
look—sunbonnety. But rouge and made-up eyes—oh, my!”
“I’m pale without rouge, and my eyes—”
“Sure, you’re pale. Let your eyes alone. How much money have you left?”
Hallie looked honest.
“A little over a hundred dollars,” said Emma.
Hallie nodded. “You can just about do it for that.”
“You mean?”
“Look the part—Iowa.”
“Frumpy and back-to-the-farm?”
“Oh, you don’t have to overdo it. All you’ve got to do is to look like
a country girl from a city man’s viewpoint. It’s easy.”
On the street, after lunch, Emma pointed to a girl that they passed.
“Like her?”
“Heavens, no. She’s just cheap. Halsted or Clark Street. Real
simplicity, I mean,” said Hallie, leading the way to Michigan Avenue.
“Cheap clothes are just like furniture—curlicues and frills and fancy
velvets and silks and things ‘in style’ come cheapest of all. It’s
simplicity that costs money. I know the shops, anyhow.”
At an exclusive little shop, Hallie picked out a plain little frock. It
was dark blue. A tiny white collar was around the neck. In front was a
touch of silk embroidery in dull shades and a small flat black bow.
“Old men, the kind you are looking for, fall for this stuff,” said
Hallie. “They all came from the country—once, though they have
forgotten what it looks like. Musical comedy and the magazines have
done their worst. They expect frilly white aprons on the farm instead
of Mother Hubbards. They want what they think is simplicity, so you may
as well give it to them.”
Emma bought the little frock. It cost forty-five dollars. The
mail-order silk had cost fifteen.
They bought a hat next, black and floppy and not too big, with a bow
on one side. It cost more than six of the stylish kind. The shoes were
stout and flat heeled and the gloves were grey. The coat was plain and
dark and had a wide belt and big pockets.
Hallie came over the next day and helped try things on. Emma’s dark
hair was parted and drawn into a plain little knot.
“That’s the stuff,” said Hallie. “To be a simple country girl you’ve
got to buy the stuff on the Boul’ Mich’, if you’re in Chicago, or
Fifth Avenue, if you’re in New York. I wish some one would expose this
small-town stuff. Why, every town the size of a water bug has at least
two stores where the buyers go to Chicago or New York twice a year.
With travelling and mail-order houses—huh, it’s only city people that
don’t know the girl from the country disappeared right after the Civil
War.”
“You’ve certainly got that straight,” said Emma. “Why, Black Plains
people spend all of their time trying to look as if they just came from
the city. But if they could see me in Black Plains dressed like this!”
Under Hallie’s directions, Emma answered a few more want-ads. She
picked out important office buildings. “Go where they are if you want
to catch them,” said Hallie, and Emma did.
In two days she had found a job. But the owner of the firm was young
and happily married and the only other man around the office was a
young boy who received twenty a week. “Nothing doing,” said Emma and
she left.
“Be careful, the city is full of allurements and pitfalls for country
girls,” said the happily married man. Emma thanked him for his advice.
“I wish I thought so,” she said to herself as she left.
The next week she found her real job. It was what she had been looking
for. She applied by mail and was told to call. She dressed in her new
clothes and left off rouge and powder.
A man of about forty-five interviewed her. He was the senior partner.
He looked old enough to suit Emma. “A nice papa,” thought she. His
younger brother was the junior partner—they sold bonds—the firm of
Fraylir and Fraylir.
Emma cast down her eyes during the interview and murmured things about
being all alone and wanting to succeed. She got the job. Her work was
to stay in the reception-room and answer questions when people came
in. There was a little typing and stenography. The wages were twenty
dollars.
“The position is an easy one, for the right girl,” Frederick Fraylir
had said. “Perhaps you don’t know what I mean because you are new to
the city. I’m glad there are still girls like you, wholesome and sane
looking. Now—”
“I can start at once,” murmured Emma. She thought she noticed a funny
little glint in his eye but she wasn’t sure. She knew she could just
about live on that twenty dollars—for a while.
“Now,” she told herself, “if Fraylir only works out according to
specifications. Rich old man, girl from the country, wife who
misunderstands—”
At first Emma didn’t know that Frederick Fraylir was married, but she
soon deduced the fact from conversation that she heard around the
office and over the telephone. The brothers lived together in a big
apartment on Lake Shore Drive and there was a Mrs. Fraylir who rang up
rather frequently. The brothers called her Belle and she had a slow,
drawling voice. “Hope she misunderstands him,” thought Emma.
Emma liked her job, as much as she liked any kind of work. She liked
Frederick and even his younger brother, Edward, though Edward was
colder, more distant. Frederick was friendly, but not friendly enough,
for Emma, though she sometimes caught him looking at her when the door
of his office was open. The brothers had one large private office
together.
In a few months she was raised to twenty-five dollars, but she knew
that this wouldn’t pay for a regular supply of the new kind of simple
clothes. She had actually begun to like them. She read magazines in her
spare time and wondered how long it would be before Fraylir would arise
to the rôle of the devilish city man. At times she was almost on the
point of quitting her job—before her clothes wore out—but she always
stayed on. She did her work as well as she knew how—really tried, and
cast down her eyes when spoken to and acted the modest and retiring
country girl.
“If they could see me act like this in Iowa,” she thought, “they’d be
wondering if I was copying some new movie star.”
But she liked it. It was so quiet and peaceful. There were no quarrels
with her sisters, no whinings of her mother, no fights between her
father and Ralph, no drummers to keep in their places.
Several times Mrs. Fraylir called. She was tall and stately and
dignified. “Cold as ice,” thought Emma, “just the kind to misunderstand
a husband.” She dropped her eyes when she answered Mrs. Fraylir’s
questions. “No use letting her suspect I’m even human. They make
trouble enough—these wives.”
Then Frederick asked her out to dinner. The suddenness of the
invitation almost staggered her. It had been a rainy day and the
evening was disagreeably cold and damp. She was putting on her simple
hat and wondering if she could buy another one soon. It was getting a
bit shabby.
“Miss Hooper,” he said, “may I—will you come to dinner with me? I have
to return to the office and look over these new papers. It’s a bit
unusual, I know, but if you don’t mind, it might be a change for you.
I thought—”
He actually seemed embarrassed—and he had grey hair and was getting old!
They went to a cozy, quiet restaurant. Fraylir ordered a simple, hearty
meal. Emma put on her best I’m-all-alone-in-the-city manner. But pretty
soon she began telling him her real impressions of the city and she was
surprised to find that he seemed to enjoy them. He had a lot more sense
than any other man she had ever known.
Halfway through the meal a well-dressed young couple came into the
restaurant. As they passed, Fraylir spoke to them. Emma was introduced,
under her real name, as Fraylir’s stenographer, and at Fraylir’s
invitation, the couple sat down at their table. Emma didn’t know
things were ever done that way at all. The young couple didn’t even
seem surprised. Emma liked to hear them talk, so quiet and well bred
and clever. Emma was careful what she said. When Fraylir smiled his
approval at her, it made her quite happy. “What kind of a fish am I
getting to be?” she asked herself that night, when she got home.
After that there were dinners and lunches and an occasional visit
to the theatre. Emma saw several dramas; she had always limited her
theatregoing to a musical comedy and vaudeville and had scoffed at
high-brow stuff. She was surprised to find that she liked them and
enjoyed discussing the problems they presented with Fraylir. Fraylir
lent her books and she read them at night because she couldn’t go
around alone very well and didn’t enjoy the other men and girls she
met—silly things. She and Fraylir went to the Art Museum and even to
a couple of private exhibitions and to musicales and she met some
interesting people. She tried to talk to Fraylir and tried to learn as
much as she could from him. After all, she had missed a lot of things
in Black Plains, stopping school at the eighth grade and running around
with a bunch of cheap, slangy travelling men.
Winter passed. Spring came. Emma stayed at Fraylir and Fraylir’s. She
knew there were dozens of millionaires looking for innocent country
girls, but the prospect seemed less real and alluring than in the past.
She felt pretty well satisfied, somehow. She went without lunches a
couple of days and managed to get some new clothes—simple things.
She met Hallie one day, Hallie with a new job and a new friend, more
tailored looking than ever.
“How’s your millionaire?” asked Hallie.
“Fine,” answered Emma, “it was great of you to tell me about clothes
and things.”
“That’s right,” said Hallie, “I see you’re sticking to the styles I
picked out for you. I hope your millionaire is the real thing.” Emma,
for some reason, felt almost insulted. It had been, well, almost coarse
of Hallie.
Then Mrs. Fraylir went away for the summer. Emma learned about it
when Mrs. Fraylir talked over the telephone to Edward or Frederick,
whichever one happened to be in the office when she rang up.
“Now’s the time,” thought Emma, “when their wives go away and
they realize how misjudged they’ve been.” But she wasn’t exactly
enthusiastic about it.
Fraylir took her out to dinner and to the summer gardens. She tried
to show him how sympathetic she could be. It surprised her to find
out that she really meant it. She was almost afraid to use all of the
little tricks that she had learned in Black Plains. It didn’t seem
honest.
Sometimes Edward Fraylir went with them, but usually the two of them
went alone.
She got a letter saying that Millie was married—she had finally landed
the drummer who travelled out of Kansas City. And Irma, next youngest,
was going with a Black Plains boy who kept a cigar store. Emma had to
write back that she was still working and she took the answering jokes
about her city success without a murmur. After all, there were so many
things besides getting a rich papa!