The girl in the crowd

by Albert Payson Terhune
Stretch an invisible cord knee-high across the sidewalk at Broadway and Forty-second Street, and in five minutes a hundred prettier girls than Daisy Reynolds will stumble over it. (A hundred homelier girls too, for that matter!)
Daisy was just the Girl in the Crowd. Look down the aisle of your subway- or surface- or L-car on the way home to-night, and you will see her. You will see her by the dozen.
But you will not observe her, unless you look hard. She is not the type of girl to make you murmur fatuously: “Gee, but I wish she was my stenographer!â€� Nor is she the sort that excites pity for her plainness. She is—yes, my term “the Girl in the Crowdâ€� best fits her.
For three years, after she left high school, Daisy occupied twenty-eight inches of space along one of the two sides of a room whose walls were wainscoted in honeycombed metal. At shelves in front of the honeycombing sat double lines of girls with ugly steel appliances over their frizzed or lanky hair. Their hands were ever flitting from spot to spot in the perforated wainscoting, deftly shifting plugs from hole to hole.
An excrescence, like a misshapen black-rubber lily, jutted forth from the wall facing each girl. Into these lily-mouths the damsels were wont to croon such airy sentiments as these:
“Schuyler 9051 don’t answer. —Yes, I’m ringing Aud’bon 2973. —Beekman 4000 is busy. —I’ll give you Inf’ma-tion. —’Xcuse it, please. —No’m, I didn’t cut you off. What number was you talking to? —Schuyler 4789 is still busy. —It’s just twelve-forty-two, by the c’rect time. —Number, please.â€�
Up and down the double rank marched a horribly efficient woman who discouraged repartee and inter-desk conversation. The long room buzzed with the rhythmic droning of fifty voices and with the purring of countless plugs clicked into innumerable sockets.
To end, once and for all, the killing suspense, the room wherein Daisy Reynolds toiled for the first three years of her business career was a telephone exchange.