led with innumerable lines. He had, she
thought, the most pathetic eyes, large and honest, but quite
irredeemably stupid.

"I can't make head or tale of it," he confessed to her on the second
night. "And Mr. Phillips gets so annoyed with me, it only muddles me
more."

"Why do you bother to learn?" she asked. It seemed rather strange that a
man of his age should have to struggle with so elementary a subject.

"I have worked in an office for the last ten years," he explained. "The
new boss has suddenly decided that shorthand is necessary. I don't
know," he spoke rather vaguely, his eyes wandering round the room, "but
it is just possible he might ask me to go if I did not master it. I have
been there so long I hardly like to have to look for another place."

"It seems such a shame," Joan told Rose afterwards, "that these people
can never get a place where they feel really safe. They live always
expecting to be turned off at a moment's notice, or to have somebody put
in on top of them. Everybody seems to be fighting against everybody
else; doesn't anyone ever stop to help?"

The older girl laughed. "Why, yes," she said. "The world, or at least
the people in it, are not so bad as all that. Only life is a case of
push and struggle, and it is only natural that people should want to get
the best they can for their money. Also it wouldn't be fair if the ones
who worked best were not preferred to the others."

Mr. Simpson, Joan's perplexed friend of the shorthand class, was
certainly one of the stupidest people she had ever met, yet she was
terribly sorry for him. He was the butt of the class, which did not add
to the hilarity of his position, because of the torrent of abuse which
he always drew from Mr. Phillips at some stage in the evening.

"Now," Mr. Phillips would call out, starting the lesson by a blackboard
demonstration, "silence and attention, please."

He would draw a series of strokes and dashes on the blackboard, calling
out their various meanings, and the class would set itself to copy them.
The lesson would proceed for some time in silence, save for Mr.
Phillips' voice, but presently the bewilderment caused by so many new
outlines would terrify Mr. Simpson and he would lean forward to
interrupt, stammering, as he always did when nervous.

"Why is 'M' made like that?" he would say. "Wouldn't it be much better
if it were made the other way?"

"Why, why?" Mr. Phillips would thunder. "If you would just learn