“Take these handouts and make ’em into shorts,” he instructed briefly.
“Handouts?” Penny asked in bewilderment. “Shorts?”
“Cut the stories to a paragraph or two each.”
“Oh,” said Penny, catching on. “You want me to rewrite them.”
At her elbow, Elda openly snickered.
Color stained Penny’s cheeks, but she quietly read the first sheet, which was an account of a meeting to be held the following week. Picking out the most important facts, she boiled the story down to two short paragraphs, and dropped the finished copy into the editor’s wire basket.
Only then did Elda speak. “You’re supposed to make two carbons of every story you write,” she said pityingly.
The girl might have told her sooner, Penny thought. However, she thanked her politely, and finding carbon paper, rewrote the story. In her nervousness she inserted one of the carbons upside down, ruining the impression. As she removed the sheets from the machine, she saw what she had done. Elda saw too, and smiled in a superior way.
“She dislikes me intensely,” Penny thought. “I wonder why? I’ve not done a thing to her.”
Aware that she had wasted paper and valuable time, Penny recopied the story a third time and turned it in to the editor. After that, she rewrote the additional stories with fairly good speed. By watching other reporters she learned that the carbon copies were speared on spindles which at intervals a copy boy collected and carried away.