y-faced stenographers. She saw the humanity of all
this mass--none the less that they envied her position and spoke privily
of "those snippy private secretaries that think they're so much sweller
than the rest of us."

She watched with peculiar interest one stratum: the old ladies, the
white-haired, fair-handed women of fifty and sixty and even seventy,
spinsters and widows, for whom life was nothing but a desk and a job of
petty pickings--mailing circulars or assorting letters or checking up
lists. She watched them so closely because she speculated always, "Will
I ever be like that?"

They seemed comfortable; gossipy they were, and fond of mothering the
girls. But now and then one of them would start to weep, cry for an hour
together, with her white head on a spotty desk-blotter, till she forgot
her homelessness and uselessness. Epidemics of hysteria would spring up
sometimes, and women of thirty-five or forty--normally well
content--would join the old ladies in sobbing. Una would wonder if she
would be crying like that at thirty-five--and at sixty-five, with thirty
barren, weeping years between. Always she saw the girls of twenty-two
getting tired, the women of twenty-eight getting dry and stringy, the
women of thirty-five in a solid maturity of large-bosomed and widowed
spinsterhood, the old women purring and catty and tragic.... She herself
was twenty-eight now, and she knew that she was growing sallow, that the
back of her neck ached more often, and that she had no release in sight
save the affably dull Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz.

Machines were the Pemberton force, and their greatest rivals were the
machines of steel and wood, at least one of which each new efficiency
expert left behind him: Machines for opening letters and sealing them,
automatic typewriters, dictation phonographs, pneumatic chutes. But none
of the other machines was so tyrannical as the time-clock. Una admitted
to herself that she didn't see how it was possible to get so many
employees together promptly without it, and she was duly edified by the
fact that the big chiefs punched it, too.... But she noticed that after
punching it promptly at nine, in an unctuous manner which said to all
beholders, "You see that even I subject myself to this delightful
humility," Mr. S. Herbert Ross frequently sneaked out and had
breakfast....

She knew that the machines were supposed to save work. But she was aware
that the girls worked just as hard and long