ll be askin' you to go to the theayter with
him--just see if he don't!"

But alas for woman's dreams! The next day we saw the boss coming across
the floor, this time alone. He sauntered up to our table, began to fling
jokes at us all in a manner of insolent familiarity, and asked the names
of the new faces. When he came to me he lingered a moment and uttered
some joking remarks of insulting flattery, and in a moment he had
grasped my bare arm and given it a rude pinch, walking hurriedly away.
In a few moments the foreman came back and motioned me to go with him,
and I followed to the front of the room, where the boss stood smoking
and joking with the wrappers. The foreman retired a respectful distance,
and the boss, after looking me over thoughtfully, informed me that I was
to be promoted Monday morning to the wrappers' counter.

"And now run away, and be a good girl the rest of the day," he
concluded, with a wave of the hand, and I rushed back to the table, more
disgusted with the man and his manner than I was thankful to him for my
promotion to a job that would pay me five dollars a week.

"Didn't I tell you so!" exclaimed my friend, amid the excited comments
and questions of the others at the table. "That's some of the foreman's
doing, and I'm real glad for you--it's nothing more than what I've been
expectin', though."

This opinion was not shared, however, by the rest of my companions, who
repeated divers terrible tales of moral ruin and betrayal, more or less
apocryphal, wherein the boss was inevitably the villain. I now found
myself suddenly the cynosure of all eyes, the target of a thousand
whispered comments, as I moved about the workroom. The physical agony of
aching back and blistered feet was too great, though, for me to feel any
mental distress over the fact--for the moment at least. In the awful
frenzy of the Saturday-afternoon rush, greater than that of any other
day of the week, I did not care much what they thought or said about the
boss and me.

I was shaking my towels and napkins, and trying to look as indifferent
as I believed I felt, when the foreman beckoned me again, and stepping
aside, thrust a piece of yellow wrapping-paper into my hand.

"Read it when nobody's looking," he said in a low voice; "and don't
think wrong of me for meddling in what's not my business"; and he was
off again.

A few minutes later I read:

"You'd better give up this job. It's no place for a girl that wants