sky-line; no explorer in evening clothes makes love to an
heiress. Here ride no rollicking cowboys, nor heroes of the great
European war. It is a world whose crises you cannot comprehend unless
you have learned that the difference between a 2-A pencil and a 2-B
pencil is at least equal to the contrast between London and Tibet;
unless you understand why a normally self-controlled young woman may
have a week of tragic discomfort because she is using a billing-machine
instead of her ordinary correspondence typewriter. The shifting of the
water-cooler from the front office to the packing-room may be an epochal
event to a copyist who apparently has no human existence beyond bending
over a clacking typewriter, who seems to have no home, no family, no
loves; in whom all pride and wonder of life and all transforming drama
seem to be satisfied by the possession of a new V-necked blouse. The
moving of the water-cooler may mean that she must now pass the sentinel
office-manager; that therefore she no longer dares break the incredible
monotony by expeditions to get glasses of water. As a consequence she
gives up the office and marries unhappily.

A vast, competent, largely useless cosmos of offices. It spends much
energy in causing advertisements of beer and chewing-gum and union suits
and pot-cleansers to spread over the whole landscape. It marches out
ponderous battalions to sell a brass pin. It evokes shoes that are
uncomfortable, hideous, and perishable, and touchingly hopes that all
women will aid the cause of good business by wearing them. It turns
noble valleys into fields for pickles. It compels men whom it has never
seen to toil in distant factories and produce useless wares, which are
never actually brought into the office, but which it nevertheless sells
to the heathen in the Solomon Islands in exchange for commodities whose
very names it does not know; and in order to perform this miracle of
transmutation it keeps stenographers so busy that they change from dewy
girls into tight-lipped spinsters before they discover life.

The reason for it all, nobody who is actually engaged in it can tell
you, except the bosses, who believe that these sacred rites of composing
dull letters and solemnly filing them away are observed in order that
they may buy the large automobiles in which they do not have time to
take the air. Efficiency of production they have learned; efficiency of
life they still consider an effeminate hobby.

A