She had not had a chance. If
Effie had been as attractive at twenty as she was at--there, we
won't betray confidences. Still, it is certain that if Effie had
been as attractive when a young girl as she was when an old girl,
she never would have been an old girl and head of Spiegel's corset
department at a salary of something very comfortably over one
hundred and twenty-five a month (and commissions). Effie had
improved with the years, and ripened with experience. She knew her
value. At twenty she had been pale, anaemic and bony, with a
startled-faun manner and bad teeth. Years of saleswomanship had
broadened her, mentally and physically, until she possessed a wide
and varied knowledge of that great and diversified subject known as
human nature. She knew human nature all the way from the fifty-
nine-cent girdles to the twenty-five-dollar made-to-orders. And if
the years had brought, among other things, a certain hardness about
the jaw and a line or two at the corners of the eyes, it was not
surprising. You can't rub up against the sharp edges of this world
and expect to come out without a scratch or so.
So much for Effie. Enter the hero. Webster defines a hero in
romance as the person who has the principal share in the
transactions related. He says nothing which would debar a
gentleman just because he may be a trifle bald and in the habit of
combing his hair over the thin spot, and he raises no objections to
a matter of thickness and color in the region of the back of the
neck.
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