She stopped before the first in a series of offices. Black-printed letters on the ground glass of the door read:
46
Carbonado Mining Company
Private. Enter No. 47
An accommodating hand pointed in the direction of No. 47. Susannah unlocked the door and with a little sigh, as of relief, stepped in.
Other offices stretched along the line of the corridor, bearing the inscriptions, respectively, “No. 48, H. Withington Warner, President and General Manager; No. 49, Joseph Byan, Vice-President; No. 50, Michael O’Hearn, Secretary and Treasurer.” Ultimately, Susannah’s own door would flaunt the proud motto, “No. 51, Susannah Ayer, Manager Women’s Department.”
Susannah threaded the inner corridor to her own office. She hung up her hat and jacket; opened her mail; ran through it. Then she lifted the cover from her typewriter and began mechanically to brush and oil it. Her mind was not on her work; it had not been on the letters. It kept speeding back to last night. She did not want to think of last night again—at least not until she must. She pulled her thoughts into her control; made them flow back over the past months. And as they sped in those pleasant channels, involuntarily her mood went with them. Had any girl ever been so fortunate, she wondered. She put it to herself in simple declaratives—
Here she was, all alone in New York and in New York for the first time, settled—interestingly and pleasantly settled. Eight months before, she had stepped out of business college without a hundred dollars in the world; her course in stenography, typewriting, and secretarial work had taken the last of her inherited funds. Without kith or kin, she was a working-woman, now, on her own responsibility. Two months of apprenticeship, one stenographer among fifty, in the great offices of the Maxwell Mills, and Barty Joyce, almost the sole remaining friend who remembered the past glories of her family, had advised her to try New York.
“Susannah,” he said, “now is the time to strike—now while the men are away and while the girls are still on war jobs. Get yourself entrenched before they come back. You’ve the makings of a wonderful office helper.”
Susannah, with a glorious sense of adventure once she was started, took his advice and moved to New York. For a week, she answered advertisements, visited offices; and she found that Barty was right. She had the refusal of half a dozen jobs. From them she selected the offer of the Carbonado Mining Company—partly because she liked Mr. Warner, and partly because it seemed to offer the best future. Mr. Warner said to her in their first interview: