Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/258

 and hoped, he clapped his hand down on his desk. "Done; I take you on." Evidently he prided himself on his snap judgments and made a point of them, though it was plain that he had not gained greatly in worldly goods by them. "References, I am sure, are satisfactory," he added, flatteringly. "Nevertheless, to keep our records complete, we must go through the form of asking for them."

"I'm afraid I can't give references," said Marjorie, frankly.

"In that case, when an applicant is otherwise satisfactory, we require a deposit of two dollars to cover cost of samples."

But when Marjorie promptly opened her hand bag, he more quickly shook his head. "I dispense with such needless routine in your case. Now, Miss Conway, here is our city territory not yet allocated." And, given a choice of six sections of Chicago and suburbs, she took for her own a long, triangular city "territory," in which she was to own the sole prerogative of visiting West Side auto dealers, bakers, bankers, barbers, butchers, chiropodists, churches, cleaners, confectioners, delicatessens, dentists, department stores, druggists and so on down Bostrock's alphabet of businesses to undertakers and wigmakers, in the interests of Bostrock's Business Boosters.

She laughed on her way home that day when she pictured herself peddling little celluloid elephants to a Swede delicatessen magnate on Milwaukee Avenue; but seriously she recognized she had a job in which, if she went at it with determination and humor, she could make good. She was on straight commission, twenty per cent of the gross; that meant, if she sold ten dollars' worth of elephants, monoplanes and blot-