The Life of Jane continued

                                       Chapter Nine


   Jane was sitting in a restaurant not far from the Citadel, the fort that was a signature of  Halifax's past . Somewhere a radio played. "Moon River/ Wider than a mile/I'm crossing you in style some day," the crooner sang.
     Jane tuned out the song. She only had a few minutes left on this November day to eat and get back to work. She now toiled away at an advertising firm in downtown Halifax and she hated the job. Every day she sat at a desk in a room with three other young people. Here under the watchful eye of a middle aged man named John Morissey, the quartet churned out advertising copy for the provincial government
       A red faced cigar smoking Morissey clad usually in plaid sport jackets and black pants, would scrap most of Jane's prose. "Make it simple," he would,tell her in a hoarse voice. "Don't use big words like this 'rambunctious' you wrote here. What does the word mean in simple English?'
      "'Rambunctious' means 'noisy'" Jane replied quietly., as she stood in front of Morissey  who sat behind his desk. and shook her head. She was 
      "Then use 'noisy' not three syllable words that only university graduates can understand.  Got it?"
        "Yes, Mr. Morissey I've got it."
        "Remember Jane we're writing for the masses, not the highbrows."
       Jane was helping write  an advertisement on the quiet touristy parts of Nova Scotia and getting nowhere with her task.
        Jane went back to her desk after standing in front of Morissey's desk that dwarfed all the other desks in the room. She sat down in her wooden chair and shook her head. All she was getting paid was forty dollars a week and going nowhere.
       Once again she was living in a rooming house that squatted in a scruffy area of Halifax. Although it was a little better than the bed sitting room she'd lived in in London, it was nothing special that's for sure.  What had been the point, she wondered,  while munching on a cocktail fruit dessert in the restaurant, of getting all this education, if she ended up just being an  ill-paid ad writer. And to make things worse, she wasn't even a good ad writer.There had to be a better way to pass the day and earn more money than doing what she was doing now.