Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/47



came briskly into her little cupboard of a room at the back of the Evening Planet office. She hung up her hat and coat, opened her rolltop desk, put her small handbag carefully in a drawer, and looked at herself in a greenish mirror that hung secretly on a hook in the recess under the pigeonholes. She took the rubber hood off her typewriter, poured three paper cupfuls of drinking water on the potted geranium on the windowledge, wound up the cheap clock on top of the desk, and moved it forward ten minutes to compensate for what it had lost during the night. Now she was ready for work. As she wound up the clock, the usual thought occurred to her—when would she be able to buy herself the handsome little wrist watch she coveted? There were a lot of them in the jeweller's shop on Park Row, and she admired them every morning on her way to the office. But when one is supporting one's self and an invalid mother in an uptown apartment,