Lord Bolingbroke - "Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope"

P.G. Wodehouse - "Uneasy Money"

Margaret Dixon McDougall - "The Letters of Norah on her Tour Through Ireland"

Various - "Literary and Philosophical Essays"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Jill the Reckless)

P >> P. G. Wodehouse >> Jill the Reckless)




She pondered over the mystery of Uncle Chris' disappearance, and
found no solution. The thing was inexplicable. She was as sure of the
address he had given in his letter as she was of anything in the
world. Yet at that address nothing had been heard of him. His name
was not even known. These were deeper waters than Jill was able to
fathom.

She walked on, aimlessly. Presently she came to Columbus Circle, and,
crossing Broadway at the point where that street breaks out into an
eruption of automobile stores, found herself suddenly hungry,
opposite a restaurant whose entire front was a sheet of plate glass.
On the other side of this glass, at marble-topped tables, apparently
careless of their total lack of privacy, sat the impecunious,
lunching, their every mouthful a spectacle for the passer-by. It
reminded Jill of looking at fishes in an aquarium. In the center of
the window, gazing out in a distrait manner over piles of apples and
grape-fruit, a white-robed ministrant at a stove juggled ceaselessly
with buckwheat cakes. He struck the final note in the candidness of
the establishment, a priest whose ritual contained no mysteries.
Spectators with sufficient time on their hands to permit them to
stand and watch were enabled to witness a New York mid-day meal in
every stage of its career, from its protoplasmic beginnings as a
stream of yellowish-white liquid poured on top of the stove to its
ultimate Nirvana in the interior of the luncher in the form of an
appetising cake. It was a spectacle which no hungry girl could
resist. Jill went in, and, as she made her way among the tables, a
voice spoke her name.

"Miss Mariner!"

Jill jumped, and thought for a moment that the thing must have been
an hallucination. It was impossible that anybody in the place should
have called her name. Except for Uncle Chris, wherever he might be,
she knew no one in New York. Then the voice spoke again, competing
valiantly with a clatter of crockery so uproarious as to be more like
something solid than a mere sound.

"I couldn't believe it was you!"

A girl in blue had risen from the nearest table, and was staring at
her in astonishment, Jill recognized her instantly. Those big,
pathetic eyes, like a lost child's, were unmistakable. It was the
parrot girl, the girl whom she and Freddie Rooke had found in the
drawing-room, at Ovington Square that afternoon when the foundations
of the world had given way and chaos had begun.

"Good gracious!" cried Jill. "I thought you were in London!"

That feeling of emptiness and panic, the result of her interview with
the Guatemalan general at the apartment house, vanished magically.
She sat down at this unexpected friend's table with a light heart.

"Whatever are you doing in New York?" asked the girl. "I never knew
you meant to come over."

"It was a little sudden. Still, here I am. And I'm starving. What are
those things you're eating?"

"Buckwheat cakes."

"Oh, yes. I remember Uncle Chris talking about them on the boat. I'll
have some."

"But when did you come over?"

"I landed about ten days ago. I've been down at a place called
Brookport on Long Island. How funny running into you like this!"

"I was surprised that you remembered me."

"I've forgotten your name," admitted Jill frankly. "But that's
nothing. I always forget names."

"My name's Nelly Bryant."

"Of course. And you're on the stage, aren't you?"

"Yes. I've just got work with Goble and Cohn. . . . Hullo, Phil!"

A young man with a lithe figure and smooth black hair brushed
straight back from his forehead had paused at the table on his way to
the cashier's desk.

"Hello, Nelly."

"I didn't know you lunched here."

"Don't often. Been rehearsing with Joe up at the Century Roof, and
had a quarter of an hour to get a bite. Can I sit down?"

"Sure. This is my friend, Miss Mariner."

The young man shook hands with Jill, flashing an approving glance at
her out of his dark, restless eyes.

"Pleased to meet you."

"This is Phil Brown," said Nelly. "He plays the straight for Joe
Widgeon. They're the best jazz-and-hokum team on the Keith Circuit."

"Oh, hush!" said Mr Brown modestly. "You always were a great little
booster, Nelly."

"Well, you know you are! Weren't you held over at the Palace last
time! Well, then!"

"That's true," admitted the young man. "Maybe we didn't gool 'em, eh?
Stop me on the street and ask me! Only eighteen bows second house
Saturday!"

Jill was listening, fascinated.

"I can't understand a word," she said. "It's like another language."

"You're from the other side, aren't you?" asked Mr Brown.

"She only landed a week ago," said Nelly.

"I thought so from the accent," said Mr Brown. "So our talk sort of
goes over the top, does it? Well, you'll learn American soon, if you
stick around."

"I've learned some already," said Jill. The relief of meeting Nelly
had made her feel very happy. She liked this smooth-haired young man.
"A man on the train this morning said to me, 'Would you care for the
morning paper, sister?' I said, 'No, thanks, brother, I want to look
out of the window and think!'"

"You meet a lot of fresh guys on trains," commented Mr Brown
austerely. "You want to give 'em the cold-storage eye." He turned to
Nelly. "Did you go down to Ike, as I told you?"

"Yes."

"Did you cop?"

"Yes. I never felt so happy in my life. I'd waited over an hour on
that landing of theirs, and then Johnny Miller came along, and I
yelled in his ear that I was after work, and he told me it would be
all right. He's awfully good to girls who've worked in shows for him
before. If it hadn't been for him I might have been waiting there
still."

"Who," enquired Jill, anxious to be abreast of the conversation, "is
Ike?"

"Mr Goble. Where I've just got work. Goble and Cohn, you know."

"I never heard of them!"

The young man extended his hand.

"Put it there!" he said. "They never heard of me! At least, the
fellow I saw when I went down to the office hadn't! Can you beat it?"

"Oh, did you go down there, too?" asked Nelly.

"Sure. Joe wanted to get in another show on Broadway. He'd sort of
got tired of vodevil. Say, I don't want to scare you, Nelly, but, if
you ask me, that show they're putting out down there is a citron! I
don't think Ike's got a cent of his own money in it. My belief is
that he's running it for a lot of amateurs. Why, say, listen! Joe and
I blow in there to see if there's anything for us, and there's a tall
guy in tortoiseshell cheaters sitting in Ike's office. Said he was
the author and was engaging the principals. We told him who we were,
and it didn't make any hit with him at all. He said he had never
heard of us. And, when we explained, he said no, there wasn't going
to be any of our sort of work in the show. Said he was making an
effort to give the public something rather better than the usual sort
of thing. No specialties required. He said it was an effort to
restore the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition. Say, who are these
Gilbert and Sullivan guys, anyway? They get written up in the papers
all the time, and I never met any one who'd run across them. If you
want my opinion, that show down there is a comic opera!"

"For heaven's sake!" Nelly had the musical comedy performer's horror
of the older-established form of entertainment. "Why, comic opera
died in the year one!"

"Well, these guys are going to dig it up. That's the way it looks to
me." He lowered his voice. "Say, I saw Clarice last night," he said
in a confidential undertone. "It's all right."

"It is?"

"We've made it up. It was like this . . ."

His conversation took an intimate turn. He expounded for Nelly's
benefit the inner history, with all its ramifications, of a recent
unfortunate rift between himself and "the best little girl in
Flatbush,"--what he had said, what she had said, what her sister had
said, and how it all come right in the end. Jill might have felt a
little excluded, but for the fact that a sudden and exciting idea had
come to her. She sat back, thinking. . . . After all, what else was
she to do? She must do something. . . .

She bent forward and interrupted Mr Brown in his description of a
brisk passage of arms between himself and the best little girl's
sister, who seemed to be an unpleasant sort of person in every way.

"Mr Brown."

"Hello?"

"Do you think there would be any chance for me if I asked for work at
Goble and Cohn's?"

"You're joking!" cried Nelly.

"I'm not at all."

"But what do you want with work?"

"I've got to find some. And right away, too."

"I don't understand."

Jill hesitated. She disliked discussing her private affairs, but
there was obviously no way of avoiding it. Nelly was round-eyed and
mystified, and Mr Brown had manifestly no intention whatever of
withdrawing tactfully. He wanted to hear all.

"I've lost my money," said Jill.

"Lost your money! Do you mean . . . ?"

"I've lost it all. Every penny I had in the world."

"Tough!" interpolated Mr Brown judicially. "I broke once way out in a
tank-town in Oklahoma. The manager skipped with our salaries. Last we
saw of him he was doing the trip to Canada in nothing flat."

"But how?" gasped Nelly.

"It happened about the time we met in London. Do you remember Freddie
Rooke, who was at our house that after-noon?"

A dreamy look came into Nelly's eyes. There had not been an hour
since their parting when she had not thought of that immaculate
sportsman. It would have amazed Freddie, could he have known, but to
Nelly Bryant he was the one perfect man in an imperfect world.

"Do I!" she sighed ecstatically.

Mr Brown shot a keen glance at her.

"Aha!" he cried facetiously. "Who is he, Nelly? Who is this blue-eyed
boy?"

"If you want to know," said Nelly, defiance in her tone, "he's the
fellow who gave me fifty pounds, with no strings tied to it,--get
that!--when I was broke in London! If it hadn't been for him, I'd be
there still."

"Did he?" cried Jill. "Freddie!"

"Yes. Oh, Gee!" Nelly sighed once more. "I suppose I'll never see him
again in this world."

"Introduce me to him, if you do," said Mr Brown. "He sounds just the
sort of little pal I'd like to have!"

"You remember hearing Freddie say something about losing money in a
slump on the Stock Exchange," proceeded Jill. "Well, that was how I
lost mine. It's a long story, and it's not worth talking about, but
that's how things stand, and I've got to find work of some sort, and
it looks to me as if I should have a better chance of finding it on
the stage than anywhere else."

"I'm terribly sorry."

"Oh, it's all right. How much would these people Goble and Cohn give
me if I got an engagement?"

"Only forty a week."

"Forty dollars a week! It's wealth! Where are they?"

"Over at the Gotham Theatre in Forty-second Street."

"I'll go there at once."

"But you'll hate it. You don't realize what it's like. You wait hours
and hours and nobody sees you."

"Why shouldn't I walk straight in and say that I've come for work?"

Nelly's big eyes grew bigger.

"But you couldn't!"

"Why not?"

"Why, you couldn't!"

"I don't see why."

Mr Brown intervened with decision.

"You're dead right," he said to Jill approvingly. "If you ask me,
that's the only sensible thing to do. Where's the sense of hanging
around and getting stalled? Managers are human guys, some of 'em.
Probably, if you were to try it, they'd appreciate a bit of gall. It
would show 'em you'd got pep. You go down there and try walking
straight in. They can't eat you. It makes me sick when I see all
those poor devils hanging about outside these offices, waiting to get
noticed and nobody ever paying any attention to them. You push the
office-boy in the face if he tries to stop you, and go in and make
'em take notice. And, whatever you do, don't leave your name and
address! That's the old, moth-eaten gag they're sure to try to pull
on you. Tell 'em there's nothing doing. Say you're out for a quick
decision! Stand 'em on their heads!"

Jill got up, fired by this eloquence. She called for her check.

"Good-bye," she said. "I'm going to do exactly as you say. Where can
I find you afterwards?" she said to Nelly.

"You aren't really going?"

"I am!"

Nelly scribbled on a piece of paper.

"Here's my address. I'll be in all evening."

"I'll come and see you. Good-bye, Mr Brown. And thank you."

"You're welcome!" said Mr Brown.

Nelly watched Jill depart with wide eyes.

"Why did you tell her to do that?" she said.

"Why not?" said Mr Brown. "I started something, didn't I? Well, I
guess I'll have to be leaving, too. Got to get back to rehearsal.
Say, I like that friend of yours, Nelly. There's no yellow streak
about her! I wish her luck!"



CHAPTER TEN


1.

THE offices of Messrs Goble and Cohn were situated, like everything
else in New York that appertains to the drama, in the neighborhood of
Times Square. They occupied the fifth floor of the Gotham Theatre on
West Forty-second Street. As there was no elevator in the building
except the small private one used by the two members of the firm,
Jill walked up the stairs, and found signs of a thriving business
beginning to present themselves as early as the third floor, where
half a dozen patient persons of either sex had draped themselves like
roosting fowls upon the banisters. There were more on the fourth
floor, and the landing of the fifth, which served the firm as a
waiting-room, was quite full. It is the custom of theatrical
managers--the lowest order of intelligence, with the possible
exception of the _limax maximus_ or garden slug, known to science--to
omit from their calculations the fact that they are likely every day
to receive a large number of visitors, whom they will be obliged to
keep waiting; and that these people will require somewhere to wait.
Such considerations never occur to them. Messrs Goble and Cohn had
provided for those who called to see them one small bench on the
landing, conveniently situated at the intersecting point of three
draughts, and had let it go at that.

Nobody, except perhaps the night-watchman, had ever seen this bench
empty. At whatever hour of the day you happened to call, you would
always find three wistful individuals seated side by side with their
eyes on the tiny ante-room where sat the office-boy, the
telephone-girl, and Mr Goble's stenographer. Beyond this was the door
marked "Private," through which, as it opened to admit some careless,
debonair, thousand-dollar-a-week comedian who sauntered in with a
jaunty "Hello, Ike!" or some furred and scented female star, the rank
and file of the profession were greeted, like Moses on Pisgah, with a
fleeting glimpse of the promised land, consisting of a large desk and
a section of a very fat man with spectacles and a bald head or a
younger man with fair hair and a double chin.

The keynote of the mass meeting on the landing was one of determined,
almost aggressive smartness. The men wore bright overcoats with bands
round the waist, the women those imitation furs which to the
uninitiated eye appear so much more expensive than the real thing.
Everybody looked very dashing and very young, except about the eyes.
Most of the eyes that glanced at Jill were weary. The women were
nearly all blondes, blondness having been decided upon in the theatre
as the color that brings the best results. The men were all so much
alike that they seemed to be members of one large family,--an
illusion which was heightened by the scraps of conversation, studded
with "dears," "old mans," and "honeys," which came to Jill's ears. A
stern fight for supremacy was being waged by a score or so of lively
and powerful young scents.

For a moment Jill was somewhat daunted by the spectacle, but she
recovered almost immediately. The exhilarating and heady influence of
New York still wrought within her. The Berserk spirit was upon her,
and she remembered the stimulating words of Mr Brown, of Brown and
Widgeon, the best jazz-and-hokum team on the Keith Circuit. "Walk
straight in!" had been the burden of his inspiring address. She
pushed her way through the crowd until she came to the small
ante-room.

In the ante-room were the outposts, the pickets of the enemy. In one
corner a girl was hammering energetically and with great speed on a
typewriter: a second girl, seated at a switchboard, was having an
argument with Central which was already warm and threatened to
descend shortly to personalities: on a chair tilted back so that it
rested against the wall, a small boy sat eating candy and reading the
comic page of an evening newspaper. All three were enclosed, like
zoological specimens, in a cage formed by a high counter terminating
in brass bars.

Beyond these watchers on the threshold was the door marked "Private."
Through it, as Jill reached the outer defences, filtered the sound of
a piano.

Those who have studied the subject have come to the conclusion that
the boorishness of theatrical managers' office-boys cannot be the
product of mere chance. Somewhere, in some sinister den in the
criminal districts of the town, there is a school where small boys
are trained for these positions, where their finer instincts are
rigorously uprooted and rudeness systematically inculcated by
competent professors. Of this school the candy-eating Cerberus of
Messrs Goble and Cohn had been the star scholar. Quickly seeing his
natural gifts, his teachers had given him special attention. When he
had graduated, it had been amidst the cordial good wishes of the
entire faculty. They had taught him all they knew, and they were
proud of him. They felt that he would do them credit.

This boy raised a pair of pink-rimmed eyes to Jill, sniffed--for like
all theatrical managers' office-boys he had a permanent cold in the
head--bit his thumb-nail, and spoke. He was a snub-nosed boy. His
ears and hair were vermilion. His name was Ralph. He had seven
hundred and forty-three pimples.

"Woddyerwant?" enquired Ralph, coming within an ace of condensing the
question into a word of one syllable.

"I want to see Mr Goble."

"Zout!" said the Pimple King, and returned to his paper.

There will, no doubt, always be class distinctions. Sparta had her
kings and her helots, King Arthur's Round Table its knights and its
scullions, America her Simon Legree and her Uncle Tom. But in no
nation and at no period of history has any one ever been so brutally
superior to any one else as is the Broadway theatrical office-boy to
the caller who wishes to see the manager. Thomas Jefferson held these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that
among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Theatrical office-boys do not see eye to eye with Thomas. From their
pinnacle they look down on the common herd, the _canaille_, and
despise them. They coldly question their right to live.

Jill turned pink. Mr Brown, her guide and mentor, foreseeing this
situation, had, she remembered, recommended "pushing the office-boy
in the face": and for a moment she felt like following his advice.
Prudence, or the fact that he was out of reach behind the brass bars,
restrained her. Without further delay she made for the door of the
inner room. That was her objective, and she did not intend to be
diverted from it. Her fingers were on the handle before any of those
present divined her intention. Then the stenographer stopped typing
and sat with raised fingers, aghast. The girl at the telephone broke
off in mid-sentence and stared round over her shoulder. Ralph, the
office-boy, outraged, dropped his paper and constituted himself the
spokesman of the invaded force.

"Hey!"

Jill stopped and eyed the lad militantly.

"Were you speaking to me?"

"Yes, I _was_ speaking to you!"

"Don't do it again with your mouth full," said Jill, turning to the
door.

The belligerent fire in the office-boy's pink-rimmed eyes was
suddenly dimmed by a gush of water. It was not remorse that caused
him to weep, however. In the heat of the moment he had swallowed a
large, jagged piece of candy, and he was suffering severely.

"You can't go in there!" he managed to articulate, his iron will
triumphing over the flesh sufficiently to enable him to speak.

"I am going in there!"

"That's Mr Goble's private room."

"Well, I want a private talk with Mr Goble."

Ralph, his eyes still moist, felt that the situation was slipping
from his grip. This sort of thing had never happened to him before.

"I tell ya he _zout!_"

Jill looked at him sternly.

"You wretched child!" she said, encouraged by a sharp giggle from the
neighborhood of the switchboard. "Do you know where little boys go
who don't speak the truth? I can hear him playing the piano. Now he's
singing! And it's no good telling me he's busy. If he was busy, he
wouldn't have time to sing. If you're as deceitful as this at your
age, what do you expect to be when you grow up? You're an ugly little
boy, you've got red ears, and your collar doesn't fit! I shall speak
to Mr Goble about you."

With which words Jill opened the door and walked in.

"Good afternoon," she said brightly.

After the congested and unfurnished discomfort of the landing, the
room in which Jill found herself had an air of cosiness and almost of
luxury. It was a large room, solidly upholstered. Along the further
wall, filling nearly the whole of its space, stood a vast and
gleaming desk, covered with a litter of papers which rose at one end
of it to a sort of mountain of play-scripts in buff covers. There was
a bookshelf to the left. Photographs covered the walls. Near the
window was a deep leather lounge: to the right of this stood a small
piano, the music-stool of which was occupied by a young man with
untidy black hair that needed cutting. On top of the piano, taking
the eye immediately by reason of its bold brightness, was balanced a
large cardboard poster. Much of its surface was filled by a picture
of a youth in polo costume bending over a blonde goddess in a
bathing-suit. What space was left displayed the legend:

ISAAC GOBLE AND JACOB COHN
PRESENT
THE ROSE OF AMERICA
(A Musical Fantasy)

BOOK AND LYRICS BY OTIS PILKINGTON
MUSIC BY ROLAND TREVIS

Turning her eyes from this, Jill became aware that something was
going on at the other side of the desk: and she perceived that a
second young man, the longest and thinnest she had ever seen, was in
the act of rising to his feet, length upon length like an unfolding
snake. At the moment of her entry he had been lying back in an
office-chair, so that only a merely nominal section of his upper
structure was visible. Now he reared his impressive length until his
head came within measurable distance of the ceiling. He had a hatchet
face and a receding chin, and he gazed at Jill through what she
assumed were the "tortoiseshell cheaters" referred to by her recent
acquaintance, Mr Brown.

"Er . . . ?" said this young man enquiringly in a high, flat voice.

Jill, like many other people, had a brain which was under the
alternating control of two diametrically opposite forces. It was like
an automobile steered in turn by two drivers, the one a dashing,
reckless fellow with no regard for the speed limits, the other a
timid novice. All through the proceedings up to this point the dasher
had been in command. He had whisked her along at a break-neck pace,
ignoring obstacles and police regulations. Now, having brought her to
this situation, he abruptly abandoned the wheel and turned it over to
his colleague, the shrinker. Jill, greatly daring a moment ago, now
felt an overwhelming shyness.

She gulped, and her heart beat quickly. The thin man towered over
her. The black-haired pianist shook his locks at her like Banquo.

"I . . ." she began.

Then, suddenly, womanly intuition came to her aid. Something seemed
to tell her that these men were just as scared as she was. And, at
the discovery, the dashing driver resumed his post at the wheel, and
she began to deal with the situation with composure.

"I want to see Mr Goble."

"Mr Goble is out," said the long young man, plucking nervously at the
papers on the desk. Jill had affected him powerfully.

"Out!" She felt she had wronged the pimpled office-boy.

"We are not expecting him back this afternoon. Is there anything I
can do?"

He spoke tenderly. This weak-minded young man--at school his coarse
companions had called him Simp--was thinking that he had never seen
anything like Jill before. And it was true that she was looking very
pretty, with her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling. She touched a
chord in the young man which seemed to make the world a
flower-scented thing, full of soft music. Often as he had been in
love at first sight before in his time, Otis Pilkington could not
recall an occasion on which he had been in love at first sight more
completely than now. When she smiled at him, it was as if the gates
of heaven had opened. He did not reflect how many times, in similar
circumstances, these same gates had opened before; and that on one
occasion when they had done so it had cost him eight thousand dollars
to settle the case out of court. One does not think of these things
at such times, for they strike a jarring note. Otis Pilkington was in
love. That was all he knew, or cared to know.