Liberty standing beside what now looked a white gravel
path of entry to the city.

There were about fifty people at work in the room, three-fourths
women, seated at desks and tables, and some occupied the dignified
position of little glass-partitioned rooms. She had one of these to
herself, in which there was also a table for a stenographer. It was a
publishing-house; books, illustrations, manuscripts, were in evidence
everywhere. Near the door was a sort of railed-in pen where men with
bundles of manuscript under their arms were usually to be seen seated,
waiting. Some of these were even shown into her office, and left minus
their bundles, or more often with them. There was a hum of chattering
typewriting machines constantly in the air, like the chirruping of
insects heard from tropical trees. Constantly her telephone rang and
she had to make excursions to the manager's office, and head printers
and printers'-ink-marked men came to her with proof-sheets, and so on,
till 12.30, when she went out to lunch at the women's cafe and had
lunch not unlike her breakfast.

The room was full of girls similarly employed, ten to thirty cents
being the average of their expenditure; all real workers, none of them
the fancy stenographers that their employers frequently take out to
little lunches at the smarter restaurants at safe distance from their
wives up town. They were not a very attractive crowd--thin,
flat-chested, and often anaemic, occasionally with pretty faces, hair,
or eyes; but work, daily work, had left its impress on them all. Some
(their luncheon bills did not exceed ten cents) looked, with their
thin fingers and arms, like human attachments to typewriting machines.
There was a something not in the least mannish, but still not
appealingly womanly, in these self-reliant, quiet business beings. Was
it a sort of neuter gender, a sexless being that was there in course
of development? Somehow, they did not strike one as beings who would
bear and suckle and nurse children. Was this severe struggle and
necessity of existence to eliminate the supreme joy of motherhood from
their lives?

Back to the office, where they joined their fellow men-workers; they
were just fellow-workers, no quarter given or looked for in the
failure to do their work. Some of them earned fine salaries, yet there
seemed a limit-point--thus far and no farther--men were always in the
highest positions. Put it down to tenacity of possession, jealousy,