A Town like Alice

air mail. I marked the passages about her money with a red pencil, and wrote a little note upon the top, and sent it into Lester for him to read. I went into his office later in the day. "You read that letter from the Paget girl?" I asked.
    He took it up from his desk before him. "Yes. I've just been looking at the will. Did you draft that discretionary clause yourself?"
    "I did."
    He smiled. "I think it's a masterpiece. It covers us all right, if you think she ought to have this money."
    "It's about nine per cent of her capital," I said. "For a commercial venture that she intends to work at whole-time herself."
    "The testator didn't know her, did he?"
    I shook my head.
    "She's twenty-seven years old?"
    "That is correct."
    "I think that we might let her have it," he said. "It would be very extreme to do the other thing, to withhold it. We've got ample latitude under your discretionary clause to let her have it, and she seems to be a responsible person."
    "I'd like to think it over for a day or so," I said. "It seems to me to be a very small amount of capital for what she wants to do."
    I put her letter on one side for a couple of days because I never like to take any action in a hurry. After a period of reflection it seemed to me that I would be carrying out the wishes of the late Mr Douglas Macfadden if I exerted myself to see that Jean Paget did not lose her money in this venture, and I picked up my telephone and rang up Mr Pack of Pack and Levy Ltd.
    I said, "Mr Pack, this is Strachan, of Owen, Dalhousie, and Peters. I believe you've had a letter from a client of mine, Miss Jean Paget."
    "Aye, that's right," he said. "You're her solicitor, are you? The one that's her trustee?"
    "That is correct," I said. "I've had a letter from her, too. I was thinking it might be a good thing if we got together, Mr Pack, and had a talk about it."
    "Well, that suits me," he replied. "She asked for a list of what she'd want to start up in a small way. I got a list together, but I haven't got all the f.o.b. prices in yet."
    I made an appointment with him for the following Friday when he expected to be in London on other business. He came to see me then at my office. He was a small, fat, cheerful man, very much of a works manager. He brought with him a brown paper parcel.
    "Afore we start," he said, "these come in this morning." He untied the parcel on my desk and produced a pair of alligator-skin shoes. I picked up one curiously.
    "What are these?" I asked.
    "They're what she made herself at this place Willstown," he said. "Did she tell you about that?"
    I shook my head, and examined them with fresh interest. "Did she make these herself, with her own hands?"
    "Made 'em with her own hands in her hotel bedroom, so she said," he replied.
    I turned one over. "Are they any good?"
    "Depends on how you look at it," he observed. "For selling in the trade they're bloody awful. Look at this, and this, and this." He pointed out the various irregularities and crudities. "They're not even the same. But she knows that. If you take them as a pair of shoes made by a typist that hadn't ever made a shoe before, working on her bed with no equipment, well, they're bloody marvellous."
    I laid down the shoe and offered him a cigarette. "She told you what she wants to do?"
    He told me what he had heard from her, and I told him some of what she had written to me; we talked for a quarter of an hour. At the end of that time I asked him, "What do you really think about her proposition, Mr Pack?"
    "I don't think she can do it," he said flatly. "Not the way she's thinking of. I don't think she knows enough about the shoe business to make a go of it."
    I must say, I was disappointed, but it was as well to have the facts. "I see," I said quietly.
    "You see," he explained, "she hasn't got the experience. She's a good girl, Mr Strachan, and she's got a good business head. But she's got no experience of making shoes to sell, and she's got no experience of keeping girls in order 'n making them bloody well work for their money. It's not even as if she was in her own country. These Australian country girls she writes about, they're just like so many foreigners to her. They may be willing, but they've never seen a factory before- they won't have the idea at all. She's got to learn her own job and teach them theirs at the same time. Well, she can't do it."
    "I see," I said again.
    "I'd like to help her," said the little man, "but she'll have to change her ideas a bit.