he rattlesnake tattoo, when Mr. Ross
summoned her, as quickly as did the newest Jewish stenographer. But hers
was a staff corps, small and exclusive and out of the regular line. On
the one hand she could not associate with the chiefs; on the other, it
was expected of her in her capacity as daily confidante to one of the
gods, that she should not be friendly, in coat-room or rest-room or
elevator, with the unrecognized horde of girls who merely copied or took
the bright young men's dictation of letters to drug-stores. These girls
of the common herd were expected to call the secretaries, "Miss," no
matter what street-corner impertinences they used to one another.

There was no caste, though there was much factional rivalry, among the
slaves beneath--the stenographers, copyists, clerks, waiting-room
attendants, office-boys, elevator-boys. They were expected to keep clean
and be quick-moving; beyond that they were as unimportant to the larger
phases of office politics as frogs to a summer hotel. Only the
cashier's card index could remember their names.... Though they were not
deprived of the chief human satisfaction and vice--feeling superior. The
most snuffle-nosed little mailing-girl on the office floor felt superior
to all of the factory workers, even the foremen, quite as negro
house-servants look down on poor white trash.

Jealousy of position, cattishness, envy of social standing--these were
as evident among the office-women as they are in a woman's club; and Una
had to admit that woman's cruelty to woman often justified the
prejudices of executives against the employment of women in business;
that women were the worst foes of Woman.

To Una's sympathies, the office proletarians were her own poor
relations. She sighed over the cheap jackets, with silesia linings and
raveled buttonholes, which nameless copyists tried to make attractive by
the clean embroidered linen collars which they themselves laundered in
wash-bowls in the evening. She discovered that even after years of
experience with actual office-boys and elevator-boys, Mr. Ross still saw
them only as slangy, comic-paper devils. Then, in the elevator, she
ascertained that the runners made about two hundred trips up and down
the dark chutes every day, and wondered if they always found it comic to
do so. She saw the office-boys, just growing into the age of interest in
sex and acquiring husky male voices and shambling sense of shame, yearn
at the shrines of past