ad protested. The superstition among the chiefs
was that all the women employees were very grateful for this charity.
The room was always shown to exclamatory visitors, who told Mr.
Pemberton that he was almost too good. But in secret conclaves at lunch
the girls called the room "the junk-shop," and said that they would
rather go out and sit on the curb.

Una herself took one look--and one smell--at the room, and never went
near it again.

But even had it been enticing, she would not have frequented it. Her
caste as secretary forbade. For Pemberton's was as full of caste and
politics as a Republican national convention; caste and politics,
cliques and factions, plots and secrets, and dynasties that passed and
were forgotten.

Plots and secrets Una saw as secretary to Mr. Ross. She remembered a day
on which Mr. Ross, in her presence, assured old Pemberton that he hoped
to be with the firm for the rest of his life, and immediately afterward
dictated a letter to the president of a rival firm in the effort to
secure a new position. He destroyed the carbon copy of that letter and
looked at Una as serenely as ever. Una saw him read letters on the
desks of other chiefs while he was talking to them; saw him "listen in"
on telephone calls, and casually thrust his foot into doors, in order to
have a glimpse of the visitors in offices. She saw one of the younger
Pembertons hide behind a bookcase while his father was talking to his
brother. She knew that this Pemberton and Mr. Ross were plotting to oust
the brother, and that the young, alert purchasing agent was trying to
undermine them both. She knew that one of the girls in the private
telephone exchange was the mistress and spy of old Pemberton. All of the
chiefs tried to emulate the _moyen-age_ Italians in the arts of smiling
poisoning--but they did it so badly; they were as fussily ineffectual as
a group of school-boys who hate their teacher. Not "big deals" and vast
grim power did they achieve, but merely a constant current of worried
insecurity, and they all tended to prove Mrs. Lawrence's assertion that
the office-world is a method of giving the largest possible number of
people the largest possible amount of nervous discomfort, to the end of
producing the largest possible quantity of totally useless articles....
The struggle extended from the chiefs to the clerks; they who tramped up
and down a corridor, waiting till a chief was alone, glaring at others
who were also ma