ng. At 7.30 she stepped out into a
snow-covered street and then hurried across Washington-square.
Bitterly cold wind shivered through the white coral-like branches of
the trees. The snow brought out the carving on the Washington Arch;
the snow seemed to suit the whole square, and make it seem still less
a part of the City--the Sleepy Hollow in the City of Unrest, with the
solid big houses around it where ladies and gentlemen lived who had
refused to be hustled into joining in the general dollar scramble.

In the street on the other side of the square she entered a
restaurant, already full of breakfasters. She sat down at one of the
marble tables with a couple of men she knew, ordered an orange,
coffee, porridge, roll, two eggs--total, thirty cents. Her friends
were in offices down town, one of them not earning as much as she was.
They were comrades, chums, so much that he often borrowed a dollar
from her during those critical days at the month's end.

[Illustration: General Yule's Column On The Way To Ladysmith.]

Breakfast finished, and a glance at the paper--at least, enough to
read the headings--and then out on Broadway to take the down-town car.
Two passed as she stood at the corner, so packed that there was not
standing-room even on the platform for another; then one stopped from
which a few passengers struggled out, and she got in. All along the
centre of the car men and women were standing, holding on to the
straps, swaying backwards and forwards as the car swooped forward, and
jerking forward every time it stopped. No idea in such a car of the
men sitting down, against whose knees hers rubbed, to get up and
relinquish their seats--why should they? She did not expect it. Was
she not by her very going down town taking the place of a possible man
there? was she not showing that she could do a man's work?
Equality--he might think himself called on to give up his seat to one
of the weaker sex. But there is no sex in the City. Swaying,
squeezing, jostling, twenty minutes of uncomfortable cattle-truck-like
journey brought her to the big office where she worked.

Men do not doff their hats in the down-town elevators which brought
her up to the big office where she was employed, a great room near the
top of one of the high down-town buildings; the windows looked out on
the river, now a white mass of down-flowing ice, through which the
calling steamers worked their way laboriously towards the harbour, to
the Statue of