U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [142]
At last they got out into a wide street with an elevated running down it where the buildings were al one or two stories and the stores were groceries and vegetable and fruit stores. Gladys Compton said, "We eat kosher, Miss Wil iams, on account of the old people. I hope you don't mind; of course Benny --Benny's my brudder --and I
haven't any prejudices." Janey didn't know what kosher was but she said of course she didn't mind and told the other girl about how funny the food was down in Mexico, so peppery you couldn't hardly eat it.
When they got to the house Gladys Compton began to
pronounce her words less precisely and was very kind and thoughtful. Her father was a little old man with glasses on the end of his nose and her mother was a fat pear-shaped woman in a wig. They talked Yiddish among themselves. They did everything they could to make
Janey comfortable and gave her a nice room and said they'd give her board and lodging for ten dol ars a week as long as she wanted to stay and when she wanted to move she could go away and no hard feelings. The house was a yel ow twofamily frame house on a long block of houses al exactly alike, but it was wel heated and the bed
-332-was comfortable. The old man was a watchmaker and worked at a Fifth Avenue jeweler's. In the old country their name had been Kompshchski but they said that in New York nobody could pronounce it. The old man had wanted to take the name of Freedman but his wife thought Campton sounded more refined. They had a good supper with tea in glasses and soup with dumplings and red caviar and gefültefisch and Janey thought it was very nice know-ing people like that. The boy Benny was stil in high-school, a gangling youth with heavy glasses who ate with his head hung over his plate and had a rude way of con-tradicting anything anybody said. Gladys said not to mind him, that he was very good in his studies and was going to study law. When the strangeness had worn off a little Janey got to like the s, particularly old Mr.
Compton, who was very kind and treated everything that happened with gentle heartbroken humor.
The work at the office was so interesting. J. Ward was beginning to rely on her for things. Janey felt it was going to be a good year for her.
The worst thing was the threequarters of an hour ride in the subway to Union Square mornings. Janey would try to read the paper and to keep herself in a corner away from the press of bodies. She liked to get to the office feeling bright and crisp with her dress feeling neat and her hair in nice order, but the long jolting ride fagged her out, made her feel as if she wanted to get dressed and take a bath al over again. She liked walking along Four-teenth Street al garish and shimmery in the sunny early morning dust and up Fifth Avenue to the office. She and Gladys were always among the first to get in. Janey kept flowers on her desk and would sometimes slip in and put a couple of roses in a silver vase on J. Ward's broad ma-hogany desk. Then she'd sort the mail, lay his personal letters in a neat pile on the corner of the blotter-pad that was in a sort of frame of red il uminated Italian leather,
-333-read the other letters, look over his engagement book and make up a smal typewritten list of engagements, inter-views, copy to be got out, statements to the press. She laid the list in the middle of the blotter under a rawcopper paperweight from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
checking off with a neat W. the items she could attend to without consulting him. By the time she was back at her desk correcting the spel ing in the copy that had emanated from Mr. Rob-bins' office the day before she began to feel a funny tingle inside her; soon J. Ward would be coming in. She told herself it was al nonsense but every time the outer office door opened she looked up expectantly. She began to worry a little; he might have had an accident driving in from Great