The Girls of Slender Means Read Online Free PDF

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        Jane's brain-work was of three kinds. First and secretly, she wrote poetry of a strictly non-rational order, in which occurred, in about the proportion of cherries in a cherry-cake, certain words that she described as "of a smouldering nature," such as loins and lovers, the root, the rose, the seawrack and the shroud. Secondly and secretly, she wrote letters of a friendly tone but with a business intention, under the auspices of the pale foreigner. Thirdly and more openly, she sometimes did a little work in her room which overlapped from her day's duties at the small publisher's office.
        She was the only assistant at Huy Throvis-Mew Ltd. Huy Throvis-Mew was the owner of the firm, and Mrs. Huy Throvis-Mew was down as a director on the letter heading. Huy Throvis-Mew's private name was George Johnson, or at least it had been so for some years, although a few very old friends called him Con and older friends called him Arthur or Jimmie. However, he was George in Jane's time, and she would do anything for George, her white-bearded employer. She parcelled up the books, took them to the post or delivered them, answered the telephone, made tea, minded the baby when George's wife, Tilly, wanted to go and queue for fish, entered the takings into ledgers, entered two different versions of the petty cash and office expenses into two sets of books, and generally did a small publisher's business. After a year George allowed her to do some of the detective work on new authors, which he was convinced was essential to the publishing trade, and to find out their financial circumstances and psychological weak points so that he could deal with them to a publisher's best advantage.
        Like the habit of changing his name after a number of years, which he had done only in the hope that his luck would turn with it, this practice of George's was fairly innocent, in that he never really succeeded in discovering the whole truth about an author, or in profiting by his investigations at all. Still, it was his system, and its plot-formation gave him a zest for each day's work. Formerly George had done these basic investigations himself, but lately he had begun to think he might have more luck by leaving new authors to Jane. A consignment of books, on their way to George, had recently been seized at the port of Harwich and ordered to be burnt by the local magistrates on the grounds of obscenity, and George was feeling unlucky at this particular time.
        Besides, it saved him all the expense and nervous exhaustion involved in the vigilant lunching with unpredictable writers, and feeling his way with them as to whether their paranoia exceeded his. It was better altogether to let them talk to Jane in a café, or bed, or wherever she went with them. It was nerve-racking enough to George to wait for her report. He fancied that many times in the past year she had saved him from paying out more ready money for a book than necessary—as when she had reported a dire need for ready cash, or when she had told George exactly what part of the manuscript he should find fault with—it was usually the part in which the author took a special pride—in order to achieve the minimum resistance, if not the total collapse, of the author.
        George had obtained a succession of three young wives on account of his continuous eloquence to them on the subject of the world of books, which they felt was an elevating one—he had deserted the other two, not they him—and he had not yet been declared bankrupt although he had undergone in the course of the years various tangled forms of business reconstruction which were probably too much for the nerves of his creditors to face legally, since none ever did.
        George took a keen interest in Jane's training in the handling of a writer of books. Unlike his fireside eloquence to his wife, Tilly, his advice to Jane in the office was furtive, for he half believed, in the twilight