I nodded dismally.

“Any idea what it’s about, Miss Trant?”

“Oh, it might be about anything this last week,” I sighed. “It might be about my forgetting to enclose those enclosures to the Western Syndicate. Or for leaving out the P.T.O. at the bottom of that Budapest letter. Or for spelling Belgium B-e-l-g-u-i-m. Or half a dozen other things. I knew Mr. Dundonald was going to complain of me. It’s been hanging over me for the last three days. Anyhow I shall know the worst to-day.”

“P’raps he’ll give you another chance, dear,” said little Miss Holt.

“That’s not very likely,” I said. “He’s such an abominably accurate machine himself that he’s ‘off’ anybody in this office who isn’t a machine too, girl or man.”

“D’you suppose the Governor even knows which of us is a girl and which is a man? because I don’t,” put in Miss Robinson. “I bet you he——”

“Talking in theyairr!” interrupted the grating Scotch accent of Mr. Dundonald, as he passed through to the Governor’s room, where, alas! I, Monica Trant, was soon to present myself.

[4]

[4]

A deathly silence, broken only by the clicking of the four typewriters, fell upon our department.

But I’m pretty sure that all the work I did from then on until lunch-time was of very little good.

That gloomy typists’ room, looking over the “well” of the great buildings in Leadenhall Street, and so dark that we worked always by electric lights, switched on one over each machine, faded away from me. I ceased to know I was breathing in that familiar smell of fog and mackintoshes and dust and stuffiness. I ceased to hear the muffled roar of the City outside, and the maddening “click! click-a-click-pprring!” of the typewriters within, as I shut myself into my own mind.

Dismally I reviewed my own situation.

Here was I, “alone in London,” all my poor little capital spent on the business-training which I had joyfully hoped was going to bring me in a nice “independent-feeling” income of at least two pounds a week. At the offices of William Waters and Son, of the Near Oriental Shipping Agency, a post I had obtained after weeks of weary searching for work, my salary was twenty-five shillings a week. Now, in all probability, I was going to lose even that. And then what was I to do? How 

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