h her ability as a long-distance listener had made him
overlook. Fortunately, she also passed this test.

When she told Mr. Wilkins that she was going to leave, he used another
set of phrases which all side-street office potentates know--they must
learn these _cliches_ out of a little red-leather manual.... He
tightened his lips and tapped on his desk-pad with a blue pencil; he
looked grieved and said, touchingly: "I think you're making a mistake. I
was making plans for you; in fact, I had just about decided to offer you
eighteen dollars a week, and to advance you just as fast as the business
will warrant. I, uh, well, I think you're making a mistake in leaving a
sure thing, a good, sound, conservative place, for something you don't
know anything about. I'm not in any way urging you to stay, you
understand, but I don't like to see you making a mistake."

But he had also told Bessie Kraker that she was "making a mistake" when
she had resigned to be married, and he had been so very certain that Una
could never be "worth more" than fifteen. Una was rather tart about it.
Though Mr. Ross didn't want her at Pemberton's for two weeks more, she
told Mr. Wilkins that she was going to leave on the following Saturday.

It did not occur to her till Mr. Wilkins developed nervous indigestion
by trying to "break in" a new secretary who couldn't tell a blue-print
from a set of specifications, that he had his side in the perpetual
struggle between ill-paid failure employers and ill-paid ambitious
employees. She was sorry for him as she watched him putter, and she
helped him; stayed late, and powerfully exhorted her successor. Mr.
Wilkins revived and hoped that she would stay another week, but stay she
could not. Once she knew that she was able to break away from the
scrub-rag, that specter of the wash-room, and the bleak, frosted glass
on the semi-partition in front of her desk, no wage could have helped
her. Every moment here was an edged agony.

In this refusal there may have been a trace of aspiration. Otherwise the
whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ignoble motives--of
Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a
mattress-renovator, and Bessie's successor; of fifteen dollars a week,
and everybody trying to deceive everybody else; of vague reasons for
going, and vaguer reasons for letting Una go, and no reason at all for
her remaining; in all, an ascent from a scrub-rag to a glorified
soap-f