The next applicant was a tall, slight, sinuous, willowy, sylph-like and ethereal creature of the hippopotamus variety, who floated into our presence like a breath of old winter, made sweet summer by the mingled odor of violets, lilacs, musk and new-mown hay. I gave her a short dictation, which she took down in longhand. I asked her why she did not write shorthand. She said she did write shorthand, unless she was in a hurry. Contemplating her huge bulk, I insinuated that we should want someone a little lighter on her corns than she, as one of the desirable accomplishments in a private secretary was that she should be able to play tennis. She said that although she had never played tennis herself, still it ran in the family, because her grandchildren were expert tennis players. When the third antique entered, the thing began to get monotonous, as Mark Twain remarked, when a mule had fallen through his tent three times in one evening. We were getting out of patience. I told the old lady at once that we did not want anyone under twenty or over thirty-five. She assured me that she was not under twenty. I told her that I had guessed as much, and asked, "How about the other limit!" She sharply retorted that she had never, in all her life, touched thirty-five. "Well," said I, "if that be so, you must have been skidding some when you went by that numeral." Disappointed, and highly indignant, we called again the next day upon that manager of the employment agency. He was profoundly apologetic, and said that he happened to have waiting in another room a young lady who was exactly what we wanted. She was immediately asked into the private office, where Mrs. Maxim and I examined her. She was about twenty-five years of age, and was, as they say down in Maine, as smart as a steel trap. I gave her a dictation replete with multi-syllabic terminology, and with unusual words of difficult orthography, but she took down everything with lightning speed, read back her notes to perfection, and transcribed them rapidly on the typewriter without a mistake. We asked for what salary she would be willing to come to us. The salary asked was pretty high, but we instantly agreed to pay it. The manager and the young lady exchanged glances, and both looked a bit surprised. Mrs. Maxim and I then asked if we might talk with the young lady alone for a few minutes. After some Sherlock Holmesy talk with the young woman, Mrs. Maxim and I came to the conclusion that she was a show girl kept by the manager merely to prove that he had the goods when required, provided anyone wished to pay a sufficiently high salary, and the salary was made high enough to deter most applicants. We got it from the girl that she had several times been hired and had worked a few days for each of a number of employers, until she could find some rational excuse for breaking away and returning to the agency, the manager of which, we also learned, was her brother, and she was a partner in the business.