He was sitting in her front room warming his shins at the steam heat when he broke the news to her, and this is the way he did it. You sports can take a tip from this so you can see how it is done, for no man can ever foretell when he will be called on to produce the same line of talk.
“Do you know,” he began, “that you are the best fellow in the world and that the more I see of you the more I like you?”
“Do you?” asked Jane, simply, for she was nothing more nor less than a country girl. “I am very glad of that, but you know the rent was due yesterday and it hasn’t been paid yet.”
“Now,” he went on, ignoring the touch, “I know you well enough to know that you would like to be independent and make your own way in the world. I want to see you where you will be in a position to support yourself, and so I have arranged with a man who is under obligations to me to give you a chance and put you in the chorus of the ‘Ice King.’ You’ll get $15 a week at the start and then you’ll be jumped to $18. After that it’s up to you whether or not you come to the front and get the real good money with the yellowbacks.”
“But I have never been on the stage,” she said.
“Don’t I know that, and haven’t I fixed it? You’ll be broken in all right and all you have to do is as you are told and you’ll get your money every Monday night.”
So it was that the girl from Peapack, N. J., became independent and self-supporting, and was able before long to send a hundred-dollar note to the folks at home, for whom she still had a deep regard. You see, it is only the girls who save their money who can do that sort of thing.
When the young fellows around town wanted to see a show, some one would suggest that they go up and see Jane, and although she hadn’t a line to speak nor a note to sing, they would line up in the front row as if she was a star. It didn’t take the manager of the show very long to find out that Jane could draw like a porous plaster and then he jumped her salary up to $25.
With that she went to a fashionable hair dresser and paid $200 to have her hair turned from chestnut blonde to a hue of a stick of pale molasses taffy, the kind you get for five cents a throw, which sticks in your teeth and plays the deuce with the filling.