tes a day. After the visitation of the expert the girls were so
efficient that they never for a second stopped their work--except when
one of them would explode in hysteria and be hurried off to the
rest-room. But no expert was able to keep them from jumping at the
chance to marry any one who would condescend to take them out of this
efficient atmosphere.

Just beneath the chiefs was the caste of bright young men who would some
day have the chance to be beatified into chiefs. They believed
enormously in the virtue of spreading the blessings of Pemberton's
patent medicines; they worshiped the house policy. Once a month they met
at what they called "punch lunches," and listened to electrifying
addresses by Mr. S. Herbert Ross or some other inspirer, and turned
fresh, excited eyes on one another, and vowed to adhere to the true
faith of Pemberton's, and not waste their evenings in making love, or
reading fiction, or hearing music, but to read diligently about soap and
syrups and window displays, and to keep firmly before them the vision of
fifteen thousand dollars a year. They had quite the best time of any one
at Pemberton's, the bright young men. They sat, in silk shirts and new
ties, at shiny, flat-topped desks in rows; they answered the telephone
with an air; they talked about tennis and business conditions, and were
never, never bored.

Intermingled with this caste were the petty chiefs, the office-managers
and bookkeepers, who were velvety to those placed in power over them,
but twangily nagging to the girls and young men under them. Failures
themselves, they eyed sourly the stenographers who desired two dollars
more a week, and assured them that while _personally_ they would be
_very_ glad to obtain the advance for them, it would be "unfair to the
other girls." They were very strong on the subject of not being unfair
to the other girls, and their own salaries were based on "keeping down
overhead." Oldish men they were, wearing last-year hats and smoking
Virginia cigarettes at lunch; always gossiping about the big chiefs, and
at night disappearing to homes and families in New Jersey or Harlem.
Awe-encircled as the very chiefs they appeared when they lectured
stenographers, but they cowered when the chiefs spoke to them, and
tremblingly fingered their frayed cuffs.

Such were the castes above the buzzer-line.

Una's caste, made up of private secretaries to the chiefs, was not above
the buzzer. She had to leap to t