The story
“Rose Scott is the stenographer in the office of wealthy John Mackey and is wooed by a clerk there, one Merwin. But Mr. Mackey himself takes a fancy to her and she becomes Mrs. John Mackey. Ten years elapse and we find the Mackeys and their little daughter Ruth on a pleasure trip. Ruth makes friends with a hotel switchboard operator and to amuse herself uses the phone in her own room to talk to the little lady at the board. For the first time since the old office days, the Mackey’s meet Merwin. Mackey finds the time very much occupied with his business projects. Mrs. Mackey, though, has time aplenty on her hands, time to renew the old friendship with Merwin. With Ruth they go walking through the city, for her husband is too busy with his affairs to do even that—even though he is on a ‘pleasure trip.’ So Merwin fills in nicely as an escort and makes himself very agreeable to the mother and daughter. But Merwin’s designs are not innocent. He tells the wife that he wants her to desert her husband. Instantly she spurns him, flees from him—she realizes that her friendship has been carried too far.
“Then some evenings elapse, and putting her daughter to bed she goes to her husband to find that he cannot stay with her even at night—even then do business appointments call him. In a rush of anger, she decides to leave him, and she tells him everything in a note expressing her resentment of his neglect. She tells Merwin on the telephone that she will join him, and the girl at the switchboard happens to hear. Immediately the switchboard operator’s mind is made up. She will act in the wife’s own best interest—swiftly. She pulls out the plug connecting the clerk’s phone with that in the wife’s room and switches the wife’s line onto the phone in the little girl’s room. So instead of falling into Merwin’s toils she hears a sweet, clear voice of her child saying: ‘Hello, mamma, did you want me?’ The baby’s voice acts as cold water on her anger. She is shocked into reason, and rushes to the table on which lays the note—and tears the missive into bits. In the meantime Merwin tries frantically to get the wife’s room on the phone again. Finally he does succeed in getting an answer from the brainy ‘hello girl,’ who says, ‘Sorry, but that line is busy.’ But Merwin sticks to his task and compels the operator to give him the line. Little Miss Operator, however, has won the great game for all that, for when the wife does talk to him she says, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’ll not go out this evening.’ Whereupon smiles are brought to the angels—through the efforts of mere little ‘hello girl.’”
Summary from The Moving Picture News · 16 March 1912
