t
time neither one of us would have been surprised if we had been charged
rent while waiting in the ante-rooms of New York offices to be told that
no one had time to tell us that there was no use of our waiting to get a
chance to ask for anything. Talk about a come-down! It was worse than
coming down a bump-the-bumps with nails in it. It was three months
before we got jobs. They were microscopic jobs in the same company, with
wages that were so small that it seemed a shame to make out our weekly
checks on nice engraved bank paper--jobs where any one from the
proprietor down could yell "Here, you!" and the office boy could have
fired us and got away with it. If I had been hanging on to a rope
trailing behind a fifty-thousand-ton ocean liner I don't believe I
should have felt more inconsequential and totally superfluous.

But they were jobs just the same and we were game. I think most college
graduates are after they get their feelings reduced to normal size. We
hung on and dug in, and sneaked more work into our positions, and
didn't quarrel with any one except the window-washer's little boy who
brought meat for the cats in the basement. We drew the line at letting
him boss us. And how we did enjoy being part of the big rumpus on
Manhattan Island. We had a room--it wasn't so much of a room as it was a
sort of stationary vest--and we ate at those hunger cures where a girl
punches out your bill on a little ticket and you don't dare eat up above
the third figure from the bottom or you'll go broke on Friday. By hook
or crook we always managed to save a dollar from the wreckage each week
for Sunday, and say, did you ever conduct a scientific investigation
into just how far a dollar will go providing a day's pleasure in a big
city? We did that for six months, and if I do say it myself we stretched
some of those dollars until the eagle's neck reached from Tarrytown to
Coney Island. We saw New York from roof garden to sub-cellar. We even
got to doing fancy stunts. We'd dig out our dress suits, go over to one
of those cafes where you begin owing money as soon as you see the head
waiter, and put on a bored and haughty front for two hours on a dollar
and twenty cents, including tips. And what we didn't know about the
Subway, the Snubway and the Grubway, the Clubway, and the various
Dubways of New York wasn't worth discovering or even imagining.

We hadn't been conducting our explorations for more than a week when a
most tremendous