apples, greasy
Napoleons, and cups of coffee, at a cheap restaurant, Miss Moynihan and
she talked about the office-manager, the editors, the strain of copying
all day, and they united in lyric hatred of the lieutenant of the girls,
a satiric young woman who was a wonderful hater. Una had regarded Miss
Moynihan as thick and stupid, but not when she had thought of falling in
love with Charlie Martindale at a dance at Panama, not in her most
fervid hours of comforting her mother, had she been so closely in
sympathy with any human being as she was with Miss Moynihan when they
went over and over the problems of office politics, office favorites,
office rules, office customs.

The customs were simple: Certain hours for arrival, for lunch, for
leaving; women's retiring-room embarrassedly discovered to be on
the right behind the big safe; water-cooler in the center of the
stenographers' room. But the office prejudices, the taboos, could
not be guessed. They offered you every possible chance of "queering
yourself." Miss Moynihan, on her very first day, discovered,
perspiringly, that you must never mention the _Gazette's_ rival,
the _Internal Combustion News_. The _Gazette's_ attitude was
that the _News_ did not exist--except when the _Gazette_
wanted the plate of an advertisement which the _News_ was to
forward. You mustn't chew gum in the office; you were to ask favors
of the lieutenant, not of the office-manager; and you mustn't be
friendly with Mr. Bush of the circulation department, nor with Miss
Caldwell, the filing-clerk. Why they were taboo Una never knew; it
was an office convention; they seemed pleasant and proper people
enough.

She was initiated into the science of office supplies. In the commercial
college the authorities had provided stenographers' note-books and
pencils, and the representatives of typewriter companies had given
lectures on cleaning and oiling typewriters, putting in new ribbons,
adjusting tension-wheels. But Una had not realized how many tools she
had to know----

Desks, filing-cabinets, mimeographs, adding-machines, card indexes, desk
calendars, telephone-extensions, adjustable desk-lights. Wire
correspondence-baskets, erasers, carbon paper, type-brushes, dust-rags,
waste-baskets. Pencils, hard and soft, black and blue and red. Pens,
pen-points, backing-sheets, note-books, paper-clips. Mucilage, paste,
stationery; the half-dozen sorts of envelopes and letter-heads.

Tools were these, as impo