Skyscraper by Faith Baldwin Read Free Book Online Page A

was a model with us when I first came to Madame Fanchon’s—good-looking,” Jennie admitted, “but not any better-looking than I am. Now she has a couple of Lincolns for the heavy work and a nice little Olds for tea parties. Two sable coats. I suppose she wears one when it’s raining. It wasn’t brains that got her there,” said Jennie.
    â€œDid she get married?” asked Lynn innocently.
    â€œBe yourself,” Jennie reproved her, and reached for another cigarette.
    Lynn flushed, furious with herself for her momentary display of unsophistication. She knew all there was to know. Several girls at the club, notably those who went in for the “arts” had vanished, to reappear as visitors in better clothes than they could afford, and not on foot. They weren’t married, either. But Jennie’s recital had been so without whispered eagerness, curiosity, or any of the elements with which the business club had discussed the rise—or fall—of its departed members that Lynn found herself reverting to older and more ignorant days. She said now, firmly, “Well, it doesn’t pay—that sort of thing.”
    â€œDoesn’t it?” Jennie glinted the long blue eyes at her guest. “I’ll say it does. Better than forty a week anyway. If you’ve sense enough to soak it away,” she added.
    When Lynn left she had a promise from Jennie to come up to the club for dinner some night. “It’s not like anything you ever saw,” Lynn explained, laughing. “You’ll get a big kick outof it.”
    Jennie did, a few days later. “I’d just as soon live in a jail!” she said while she was inspecting Lynn’s quarters after dinner, during which she had withstood the astonished glare of the directress very well indeed.
    â€œIt’s not so hot,” Lynn admitted. “I’m getting pretty fed up with it myself.”
    She found herself meeting Jennie now and then for luncheon in the cafeteria. And then Jennie and the telephone-company engineer—a lanky, attractive lad named Howell—Lynn and Tom went to a movie together. This was repeated at intervals though Tom protested, laughing, after the first occasion: “Where did you pick her up, Lynn? She isn’t your sort.”
    â€œWhat’s the matter with her?” Lynn wanted to know, indignant. She liked Jennie. There was something slow and expansive about her, something relaxing. She was almost bovine, in her lazy, effortless movements, in her enjoyment of food, in her tremendous desire never to walk when she could ride, never to stand up when she could sit down, never to sit down when she could lie down. How she kept her amazingly slender figure was more than Lynn could fathom.
    Then too, she never posed, except perhaps when on display and then only physically. Jennie was frankly herself. Take me or leave me , her attitude said, and I don’t give a damn which you do, personally. I’d rather sleep!
    â€œNothing,” Tom admitted, “but poor old Slim Howell is crazy about her. He thinks she’s Venus and Mrs. Socrates all rolled into one!”
    â€œOh, Tom, not Mrs. Socrates!”
    â€œWhy not? Wasn’t she a smart femme? Well, he thinks Jennie is,” grinned Tom, “and in my opinion she is a perfect vacuum above the neck.” He added, “I like girls with brains.”
    â€œMeaning me?”
    â€œYou? I don’t know if you have any brains or not,” said Tom, “and I don’t care. I don’t like you, anyway—I’m crazy about you. I love you to death!”
    This was while bus riding, on a freezing night. Lynn snuggledher pointed chin into her collar. Her hand was warm, the hand which Tom held firmly in his overcoat pocket. It wasn’t the first time he had told her that he loved her. It was about the hundred and first. But she wouldn’t take him seriously. Or so she told herself, and