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"
"
"
About four or five years," replied Jimmy.
For whom did you work?"
I was in business for myself," replied the applicant, "both in the West and in the
East. I got my first experience in a small town in Nebraska, but I carried on a
larger business in the East later."
So they gave Jimmy a trial in a new section of the hosiery department, wherein he
was the only male clerk. The buyer had discovered that there was a sufficient
proportion of male customers, many of whom displayed evident embarrassment
in purchasing hosiery from young ladies, to warrant putting a man clerk in one of
the sections for this class of trade.
The fact of the matter was, however, that the astute buyer was never able to
determine the wisdom of his plan, since Jimmy's entire time was usually
occupied in waiting upon impressionable young ladies. However, inasmuch as it
redounded to the profit of the department, the buyer found no fault.
Possibly if Jimmy had been almost any other type of man from what he was, his
presence would not have been so flamboyantly noticeable in a hosiery
department. His stature, his features, and his bronzed skin, that had lost nothing
of its bronze in his month's search for work through the hot summer streets of a
big city, were as utterly out of place as would have been the salient
characteristics of a chorus-girl in a blacksmith-shop.
For the first week Jimmy was frightfully embarrassed, and to his natural bronze
was added an almost continuous flush of mortification from the moment that he
entered the department in the morning until he left it at night.
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