rtant in her trade as the masthead and black
flag, the cutlasses and crimson sashes, the gold doubloons and damsels
fair of pirate fiction; or the cheese and cream, old horses and
slumberous lanes of rustic comedy. As important, and perhaps to be
deemed as romantic some day; witness the rhapsodic advertisements of
filing-cabinets that are built like battle-ships; of carbon-paper that
is magic-inked and satin-smooth.

Not as priest or soldier or judge does youth seek honor to-day, but as a
man of offices. The business subaltern, charming and gallant as the
jungle-gallopers of Kipling, drills files, not of troops, but of
correspondence. The artist plays the keys, not of pianos, but of
typewriters. Desks, not decks; courts of office-buildings, not of
palaces--these are the stuff of our latter-day drama. Not through
wolf-haunted forests nor purple canons, but through tiled hallways and
elevators move our heroes of to-day.

And our heroine is important not because she is an Amazon or a Ramona,
but because she is representative of some millions of women in business,
and because, in a vague but undiscouraged way, she keeps on inquiring
what women in business can do to make human their existence of loveless
routine.

Sec. 4

Una spent much of her time in copying over and over--a hundred times,
two hundred times--form-letters soliciting advertising, letters too
personal in appearance to be multigraphed. She had lists of
manufacturers of motor-car accessories, of makers of lubricating oils,
of distributors of ball-bearings and speedometers and springs and
carburetors and compositions for water-proofing automobile tops.

Sometimes she was requisitioned by the editorial department to copy in
form legible for the printer the rough items sent in by outsiders for
publication in the _Gazette_. Una, like most people of Panama, had
believed that there was something artistic about the office of any
publication. One would see editors--wonderful men like grand dukes,
prone to lunch with the President. But there was nothing artistic about
the editorial office of the _Gazette_--several young men in
shirt-sleeves and green celluloid eye-shades, very slangy and
pipe-smelly, and an older man with unpressed trousers and ragged
mustache. Nor was there anything literary in the things that Una copied
for the editorial department; just painfully handwritten accounts of the
meeting of the Southeastern Iowa Auto-dealers' Association; or boasts