about the increased sales of Roadeater Tires, a page originally smartly
typed, but cut and marked up by the editors.

Lists and letters and items, over and over; sitting at her typewriter
till her shoulder-blades ached and she had to shut her eyes to the blur
of the keys. The racket of office noises all day. The three-o'clock hour
when she felt that she simply could not endure the mill till five
o'clock. No interest in anything she wrote. Then the blessed hour of
release, the stretching of cramped legs, and the blind creeping to the
Subway, the crush in the train, and home to comfort the mother who had
been lonely all day.

Such was Una's routine in these early months of 1906. After the novelty
of the first week it was all rigidly the same, except that distinct
personalities began to emerge from the mass.

Especially the personality of Walter Babson.

Sec. 5

Out of the mist of strange faces, blurred hordes of people who swaggered
up the office aisle so knowingly, and grinned at her when she asked
questions, individualities began to take form:

Miss Moynihan; the Jewish stenographer with the laughing lips and hot
eyes; the four superior older girls in a corner, the still more superior
girl lieutenant, and the office-manager, who was the least superior of
all; the telephone-girl; the office-boys; Mr. S. Herbert Ross and his
assistant; the managing editor; a motor magnate whose connection was
mysterious; the owner, a courteous, silent, glancing man who was
reported to be hard and "stingy."

Other people still remained unidentifiable to her, but the office
appeared smaller and less formidable in a month. Out of each nine
square feet of floor space in the office a novel might have been made:
the tale of the managing editor's neurotic wife; the tragedy of Chubby
Hubbard, the stupid young editor who had been a college football star,
then an automobile racer, then a failure. And indeed there was a whole
novel, a story told and retold, in the girls' gossip about each of the
men before whom they were so demure. But it was Walter Babson whom the
girls most discussed and in whom Una found the most interest.

On her first day in the office she had been startled by an astounding
young man who had come flying past her desk, with his coat off, his
figured waistcoat half open, his red four-in-hand tie askew under a
rolling soft collar. He had dashed up to the office-manager and
demanded, "Say! Say! Nat! Got that Kokomobile