n unreasonable world, sacrificing bird-song and tranquil dusk and high
golden noons to selling junk--yet it rules us. And life lives there. The
office is filled with thrills of love and distrust and ambition. Each
alley between desks quivers with secret romance as ceaselessly as a
battle-trench, or a lane in Normandy.

Sec. 3

Una's first view of the _Motor and Gas Gazette_ was of an overwhelming
mass of desks and files and books, and a confusing, spying crowd of
strange people, among whom the only safe, familiar persons were Miss
Moynihan, the good-natured solid block of girl whom she had known at the
commercial college, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross, the advertising-manager,
who had hired her. Mr. Ross was a poet of business; a squat, nervous
little man, whose hair was cut in a Dutch bang, straight across his
forehead, and who always wore a black bow tie and semi-clerical black
clothes. He had eyed Una amusedly, asked her what was her reaction to
green and crimson posters, and given her a little book by himself, "R U
A Time-clock, Mr. Man?" which, in large and tremendously black type,
related two stories about the youth of Carnegie, and strongly advocated
industry, correspondence schools, and expensive advertising. When Una
entered the office, as a copyist, Mr. S. Herbert Ross turned her over to
the office-manager, and thereafter ignored her; but whenever she saw him
in pompous conference with editors and advertisers she felt proudly that
she knew him.

The commercial college had trained her to work with a number of people,
as she was now to do in the office; but in the seriousness and savage
continuity of its toil, the office was very different. There was no
let-up; she couldn't shirk for a day or two, as she had done at the
commercial college. It was not so much that she was afraid of losing her
job as that she came to see herself as part of a chain. The others,
beyond, were waiting for her; she mustn't hold them up. That was her
first impression of the office system, that and the insignificance of
herself in the presence of the office-hierarchy--manager above manager
and the Mysterious Owner beyond all. She was alone; once she
transgressed they would crush her. They had no personal interest in her,
none of them, except her classmate, Miss Moynihan, who smiled at her and
went out to lunch with her.

They two did not dare to sit over parcels of lunch with the curious
other girls. Before fifteen-cent lunches of baked