entle telephone required in its attendants. Girls were easier to
train; they did not waste time in retaliatory conversation; they were
more careful; and they were much more likely to give "the soft answer
that turneth away wrath."

A telephone call under the boy regime meant Bedlam and five minutes;
afterwards, under the girl regime, it meant silence and twenty seconds.
Instead of the incessant tangle and tumult, there came a new species of
exchange--a quiet, tense place, in which several score of young ladies
sit and answer the language of the switchboard lights. Now and then,
not often, the signal lamps flash too quickly for these expert phonists.
During the panic of 1907 there was one mad hour when almost every
telephone in Wall Street region was being rung up by some desperate
speculator. The switchboards were ablaze with lights. A few girls lost
their heads. One fainted and was carried to the rest-room. But the
others flung the flying shuttles of talk until, in a single exchange
fifteen thousand conversations had been made possible in sixty minutes.
There are always girls in reserve for such explosive occasions, and when
the hands of any operator are seen to tremble, and she has a warning
red spot on each cheek, she is taken off and given a recess until she
recovers her poise.

These telephone girls are the human part of a great communication
machine. They are weaving a web of talk that changes into a new pattern
every minute. How many possible combinations there are with the five
million telephones of the Bell System, or what unthinkable mileage of
conversation, no one has ever dared to guess. But whoever has once
seen the long line of white arms waving back and forth in front of the
switchboard lights must feel that he has looked upon the very pulse of
the city's life.

In 1902 the New York Telephone Company started a school, the first of
its kind in the world, for the education of these telephone girls. This
school is hidden amid ranges of skyscrapers, but seventeen thousand
girls discover it in the course of the year. It is a most particular and
exclusive school. It accepts fewer than two thousand of these girls, and
rejects over fifteen thousand. Not more than one girl in every eight can
measure up to its standards; and it cheerfully refuses as many students
in a year as would make three Yales or Harvards.

This school is unique, too, in the fact that it charges no fees, pays
every student five dollars a w