Page:Spider Boy (1928).pdf/222

 from the plains of Nebraska, the farms of Illinois, and the plantations of Georgia. Any girl who isn't cross-eyed and hasn't a crooked nose makes tracks for California to cash in on her face. Some of 'em arrived before they put up the bars. Now they buy 'em tickets and send 'em back home, but those who got here before they adopted this plan, the six thousand, most of 'em, went to work as shop-girls in department stores or drug-stores, or as waitresses in bakeries or lunch-rooms, or as telephone girls—well, poor things, they got what they could. They look so appealingly out of their big eyes at every male who comes within the line of their vision that at first I thought they were flirting, but they're only banking on the chance that any man may be a director and hoping they'll get a break.

The more Ambrose heard about this fabulous land he was inhabiting for the present, the more he marvelled.

Is that what you did? he inquired.

Not me! Not much! They never get anything, these girls. I learned that at once. They use the wrong technique. Do you know what I discovered? Shall I tell you my secret?

Please do.

I hadn't been here three days before I began to