Options | Page 8

mentality and
literature not of the less worthy intricacies of trade."
Well, what's the trouble about running the article," asked Thacker, a
little impatiently, "if the man's well known and has got the stuff ?"
Colonel Telfair sighed.
"Mr. Thacker," said he, "for once I have been tempted. Nothing has yet
appeared in The Rose of Dixie that has not been from the pen of one of
its sons or daughters. I know little about the author of this article except
that he has acquired prominence in a section of the country that has
always been inimical to my heart and mind. But I recognize his genius;
and, as I have told you, I have instituted an investigation of his
personality. Perhaps it will be futile. But I shall pursue the inquiry.
Until that is finished, I must leave open the question of filling the
vacant space in our January number."
Thacker arose to leave.
"All right, Colonel," he said, as cordially as he could. "You use your
own judgment. If you've really got a scoop or something that will make
'em sit up, run it instead of my stuff. I'll drop in again in about two
weeks. Good luck!"
Colonel Telfair and the magazine promoter shook hands.
Returning a fortnight later, Thacker dropped off a very rocky Pullman
at Toombs City. He found the January number of the magazine made
up and the forms closed.

The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an
article that was headed thus:
SECOND MESSAGE TO CONGRESS
Written for
THE ROSE OF DIXIE
BY
A Member of the Well-known
BULLOCH FAMILY, OF GEORGIA
T. Roosevelt

THE THIRD INGREDIENT

The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an
apartment-house. It is composed of two old-fashioned,
brownstone-front residences welded into one. The parlor floor of one
side is gay with the wraps and head-gear of a modiste; the other is
lugubrious with the sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless
dentist. You may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may
have one for twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa's roomers are
stenographers, musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art
students, wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the
banister-rail when the door-bell rings.
This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallambrosians--
though meaning no disrespect to the others.
At six o'clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor
rear $3.50 room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin more
sharply pointed than usual. To be discharged from the department store
where you have been working four years, and with only fifteen cents in
your purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear more
finely chiseled.
And now for Hetty's thumb-nail biography while she climbs the two
flights of stairs.
She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before with
seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waist department
counter. The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering scene of
beauty, carrying a total mass of blond hair sufficient to have justified
the horseback gallops of a hundred Lady Godivas.

The capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man whose
task it was to engage six of the contestants, was aware of a feeling of
suffocation as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipanni, while white
clouds, hand-embroidered, floated about him. And then a sail hove in
sight. Hetty Pepper, homely of countenance, with small, contemptuous,
green eyes and chocolate-colored hair, dressed in a suit of plain burlap
and a common-sense hat, stood before him with every one of her
twenty-nine years of life unmistakably in sight.
"You're on!." shouted the bald-headed young man, and was saved. And
that is how Hetty came to be employed in the Biggest Store. The story
of her rise to an eight-dollar-a-week salary is the combined stories of
Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood. You
shall not learn from me the salary that was paid her as a beginner.
There is a sentiment growing about such things, and I want no
millionaire store-proprietors climbing the fire-escape of my tenement-
house to throw dynamite bombs into my skylight boudoir.
The story of Hetty's discharge from the Biggest Store is so nearly a
repetition of her engagement as to be monotonous.
In each department of the store there is an omniscient, omnipresent, and
omnivorous person carrying always a mileage book and a red necktie,
and referred to as a "buyer." The destinies of the girls in his department
who live on (see Bureau of Victual Statistics)--so much per week are in
his hands.
This particular buyer was a capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young,
bald-headed man. As he walked along the aisles of his department lie
seemed to be sailing on a sea