week. It
was just the sum I was paying for a pair of clean sheets every night at
a grand hotel. And that the salary rose to six, seven, eight, eleven,
and even fourteen dollars for supervisors, who, however, had to stand on
their feet seven and a half hours a day, as shop-girls do for ten hours
a day; and that in general the girls had thirty minutes for lunch, and a
day off every week, and that the Company supplied them gratuitously with
tea, coffee, sugar, couches, newspapers, arm-chairs, and fresh air, of
which last fifty fresh cubic feet were pumped in for every operator
every minute.

"Naturally," I was told, "the discipline is strict. There are test
wires.... We can check the 'time elements.' ... We keep a record of
every call. They'll take a dollar a week less in an outside place--for
instance, a hotel.... Their average stay here is thirty months."

And I was told the number of exchanges there were in New York, exactly
like the one I was seeing.

A dollar a week less in a hotel! How feminine! And how masculine! And
how wise for one sort of young woman, and how foolish for another!...
Imagine quitting that convent with its guaranteed fresh air, and its
couches and sugar and so on, for the rough hazards and promiscuities of
a hotel! On the other hand, imagine not quitting it!

Said the demigod of the electrical world, condescendingly: "All this
telephone business is done on a mere few hundred horse-power. Come away,
and I'll show you electricity in bulk."

And I went away with him, thoughtful. In spite of the inhuman perfection
of its functioning, that exchange was a very human place indeed. It
brilliantly solved some problems; it raised others. Excessively
difficult to find any fault whatever in it! A marvelous service,
achieved under strictly hygienic conditions--and young women must make
their way through the world! And yet--Yes, a very human place indeed!

* * * * *

The demigods of the electric world do not condescend to move about in
petrol motor-cars. In the exercise of a natural and charming coquetry
they insist on electrical traction, and it was in the most modern and
soundless electric brougham that we arrived at nightfall under the
overhanging cornice-eaves of two gigantic Florentine palaces--just such
looming palaces, they appeared in the dark, as may be seen in any
central street of Florence, with a cinema-show blazing its signs on the
ground floor, and Heaven know