“Gracious! of course I know shorthand!” said Ellen, her astonishment proving her competence.
Mrs. Putnam laid down her hammer and drew another long breath. “How much time can you give us?” she asked. “Two afternoons a week? Three?”
“Oh, my!” said Ellen, “I can give you all my time, from eight in the morning till six at night. That’s what I came for.”
Mrs. Putnam looked at her a moment as though to assure herself that she was not dreaming, and then, seizing her by the arm, she propelled her rapidly towards the back of the room, and through a small door into a dingy little room with two desks in it. Among the heaped-up papers on one of these a blond young woman with inky fingers sought wildly something which she did not find. She said without looking up: “Oh, Aunt Maria, I’ve just discovered that that shipment of clothes from Louisville got acknowledged to the people in Seattle! And I can’t find that letter from the woman in Indianapolis who offered to send children’s shirts from her husband’s factory. You said you laid it on your desk, last night, but I cannot find it. And do you remember what you wrote Mrs. Worthington? Did you say anything about the shoes?”
Ellen heard this but dimly, her gaze fixed on the confusion of the desks which made her physically dizzy to contemplate. Never had she dreamed that papers, sacred records of fact, could be so maltreated. In a reflex response to the last question of the lovely, distressed young lady she said: “Why don’t you look at the carbon copy of the letter to Mrs. Worthington?”
“Copy!” cried the young lady, aghast. “Why, we don’t begin to have time to write the letters once, let alone copy them!”
Ellen gazed horrified into an abyss of ignorance which went beyond her utmost imaginings. She said feebly, “If you kept your letters in a letter-file, you wouldn’t ever lose them.”
“There,” said Mrs. Putnam, in the tone of one unexpectedly upheld in a rather bizarre opinion, “I’ve been saying all the time we ought to have a letter-file. But do you suppose you could buy one in Paris?” She spoke dubiously from the point of view of one who had bought nothing but gloves and laces and old prints in Paris.
Ellen answered with the certainty of one who had found the Y. W. C. A. in Paris: “I’m sure you can. Why, they could not do business a minute without letter-files.”
Mrs. Putnam sank into a chair with a sigh of bewilderment and fatigue, and showed herself to be as truly a superior person as she looked by making the following speech to the newcomer: “The truth is, Miss....”