Yet another Irishman remarked, "I
don't know who you are or where you came from or where you got your
education, but you shure have got us all on the run!" But any girl
with the least wits about her would have had them on the run. She was
the only girl these men got a chance to talk to the greater part of
the day.

But what if a girl had a couple of years of that sort of thing? Or
does she get this attention only the first couple of weeks of the
couple of years, anyhow? Does a waiter grow tired of expressing his
affection before or after the girl grows tired of hearing it? I could
not help but feel that most of it was due to the fact that perhaps
among those waiters and such girls as they knew a purely friendly
relationship was practically unknown. Sex seemed to enter in the first
ten minutes. Girls are not for friends--they're to flirt with. It was
for the girl to set the limits; the man had none.

But eight and one-half hours a day of parrying the advances of
affectionate waiters--a law should be passed limiting the cause for
such exertion to two hours a day, no overtime. Nor have I taken the
gentle reader into my confidence regarding the Spanish chef in the
main kitchen. He did the roasting. I had to pass his stove on my way
to the elevators. At which he dropped everything, wiped his hands on
his apron, and beamed from ear to ear until I got by. One day he
dashed along beside me and directed an outburst of Spanish into my
ear. When I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders and got it into
his head that I was not a countrywoman, his dismay was purely
temporary. He spoke rather flowery English. Would I walk up the stairs
with him? No, I preferred the elevator. He, did too. I made the most
of it by asking him questions too fast for him to ask me any. He was a
tailor by trade, but business had been dull for months. In despair he
had taken to roasting. Some six months he had been at our hotel. He
much preferred tailoring, and in two months he would be back at his
trade in a little shop of his own, making about fifty to seventy-five
dollars a week. And then he got in his first question.

"Are you married?"

"No."

"Could I then ask you to go out with me some evening?"--all this with
many beams and wipings of hands on his apron.

Well, I was very busy.

But one evening. Oh, just one evening--surely one evening.

Well, perhaps--

To-night, then?

No, not to-night.

To-morrow night?

No, no night this week