"Do you like it?" asked Katharine. The girl stared again. The possibility of liking one's work had never occurred to her before.
"Of course not; but we have to grin and bear it, like the food here and everything else. I'm sorry for you if you mean to stop here long; you don't look as though you could stand it. I've seen your sort before, and they never stop long."
"Oh, I mean to stop," said Katharine decidedly. But her heroic mood had been completely dissipated by the leaden atmosphere of the place, and she could not repress a sigh.
"Butter bad?" asked her neighbour cheerfully. "Try the treacle; it's safer. You can't go far wrong with treacle. The jam's always suspicious; you find plum stones in the strawberries, and so on."
Katharine was obliged to laugh, and the shorthand clerk, who had not meant to make a joke, seemed hurt.
"I beg your pardon," said Katharine, "but your cynical view of the food is so awfully funny."
"Wait till you've been here three years, like I have," said the shorthand clerk, and she returned to her newspaper.
Katharine tried to stay the sinking at her heart, and made a critical review of the room. What impressed her most was the twang of the girls' voices. Not that they were noisy,—for they seemed a quiet set on the whole; either daily routine or respectability had succeeded in subduing their spirits; but for all that they did not look unhappy, and Katharine supposed, as her neighbour had remarked, that it was possible to get used to it after a time.
"And the room is certainly clean," she reflected, as she made an effort to see the brighter side of things; "and the girls don't stare, or ask questions, or do anything unpleasant. I couldn't tell them anything about myself if they did. And I do wish, though I know it's awfully snobbish, that some of them were ladies."
Her neighbour broke in upon her thoughts, and Katharine came to herself with a start.