life sorrow. Whenever Pearlie asked that
inevitable question of the fat woman: "Am I as fat as she is?" her
mother always answered: "You! Well, I should hope not! You're looking
real peaked lately, Pearlie. And your blue skirt just ripples in the
back, it's getting so big for you."

Of such blessed stuff are mothers made.

But if the gods had denied Pearlie all charms of face or form, they had
been decent enough to bestow on her one gift. Pearlie could cook like an
angel; no, better than an angel, for no angel could be a really clever
cook and wear those flowing kimono-like sleeves. They'd get into the
soup. Pearlie could take a piece of rump and some suet and an onion and
a cup or so of water, and evolve a pot roast that you could cut with a
fork. She could turn out a surprisingly good cake with surprisingly few
eggs, all covered with white icing, and bearing cunning little jelly
figures on its snowy bosom. She could beat up biscuits that fell apart
at the lightest pressure, revealing little pools of golden butter within.
Oh, Pearlie could cook!

On week days Pearlie rattled the typewriter keys, but on Sundays she
shooed her mother out of the kitchen. Her mother went, protesting
faintly:

"Now, Pearlie, don't fuss so for dinner. You ought to get your rest on
Sunday instead of stewing over a hot stove all morning."

"Hot fiddlesticks, ma," Pearlie would say, cheerily. "It ain't hot,
because it's a gas stove. And I'll only get fat if I sit around. You
put on your black-and-white and go to church. Call me when you've got as
far as your corsets, and I'll puff your hair for you in the back."

In her capacity of public stenographer at the Burke Hotel, it was
Pearlie's duty to take letters dictated by traveling men and beginning:
"Yours of the 10th at hand. In reply would say. . . ." or: "Enclosed
please find, etc." As clinching proof of her plainness it may be stated
that none of the traveling men, not even Max Baum, who was so fresh that
the girl at the cigar counter actually had to squelch him, ever called
Pearlie "baby doll," or tried to make a date with her. Not that Pearlie
would ever have allowed them to. But she never had had to reprove them.
During pauses in dictation she had a way of peering near-sightedly, over
her glasses at the dapper, well-dressed traveling salesman who was
rolling off the items on his sale bill. That is a trick which would make
the prettiest kind of a girl look owl