ng less like a spider than Mr. Strangman it would have been
difficult to imagine. He was an alert, nervous man, with bright, kind
eyes, a flexible mouth and very restless hands. His whole nature hung on
wires, as if--which was indeed the case--his mental capacity was too big
and overpowering for his physical strength. His manners under the strain
of work were jerky and abrupt, but otherwise he was a very kindly and
genial man. To Joan he was excessively polite, and so afraid that her
capabilities might not come up to his expectations that for the first
few days he left her practically with no work to do. She sat in a large,
well-lit--if draughty--room, opposite Mr. Strangman at his table.

It was one of her duties, she discovered, to keep the aforesaid table
tidy, and in time she learned that here more than anywhere else she
could be of service to the man. He had an awe-inspiring way of piling up
his desk with scraps of paper, cuttings, and slips, and stray
manuscripts, and it was always under the most appalling muddle that the
one small, indispensable news-slip would hide itself.

The Magazine Page-faker and the News-gleaner sat in the same room, the
latter at a table next Joan. He was a stout man with a beaming smile and
an inexhaustible supply of good temper. He would sit over his work,
which as far as she could see consisted solely of running his eye over
the day's papers and cutting out what appeared to be workable news,
making a great deal of noise with his feet on the floor, a gigantic
cutting-out scissors in his hand and a whistle which never varied its
tune from early morning till late in the evening--a soft, subdued,
under-his-breath whistle, Joan never even discovered what the tune was.
He was, despite this disadvantage, an indefatigable worker and an
ever-ready helper, always willing to do other people's work for them if
necessary.

Of the other people on the staff Joan saw very little; the reporters
came early in the morning to take their orders for the day, and threw in
their copy downstairs in the evening. Sometimes they would come upstairs
to discuss some feature of their day's work with Mr. Strangman, or to
put in an article to the Literary Editor, but, as a whole, she hardly
learned to know them, even by name. Then there were the office boys, a
moving, fluctuating crowd; always in mischief, always dirty, always
irrepressibly cheerful. For the rest, her work--one might almost say her
life--lay between