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Jimmy did not forget to close the door. As he walked the length of the

interminable room between rows of desks, before which were seated young men

and young women, all of whom Jimmy thought were staring at him, he could feel

the deep crimson burning upward from his collar to the roots of his hair.

Never before in his life had Jimmy's self-esteem received such a tremendous jolt.

He was still blushing when he reached his cab, and as he drove back toward the

Loop he could feel successive hot waves suffuse his countenance at each

recollection of the humiliating scene through which he had just passed.

It was not until the next day that Jimmy had sufficiently reestablished his self-

confidence to permit him to seek out the party who wished a mail-order manager,

and while in this instance he met with very pleasant and gentlemanly treatment,

his application was no less definitely turned down.

For a month Jimmy trailed one job after another. At the end of the first week he

decided that the street-cars and sole leather were less expensive than taxicabs, as

his funds were running perilously low; and he also lowered his aspirations

successively from general managerships through departmental heads, assistants

thereto, office managers, assistant office managers, and various other vocations,

all with the same result; discovering meanwhile that experience, while possibly

not essential as some of the ads stated, was usually the rock upon which his

hopes were dashed.

He also learned something else which surprised him greatly: that rather than

being an aid to his securing employment, his college education was a drawback,

several men telling him bluntly that they had no vacancies for rah-rah boys.

At the end of the second week Jimmy had moved from his hotel to a still less

expensive one, and a week later to a cheap boarding-house on the north side. At

first he had written his father and his mother regularly, but now he found it

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