The evening after my first day spent as a clerk of the District Board for the City of New York I reached the Jane Leonard in time to be among the first who entered the dining-room for dinner. The meal was good enough, soup, roast lamb and a vegetable, and it being Monday the aprons and shirt-waists of the waitresses were still clean, but—oh, the flies! These pests swarmed over everything except Miss Diggs’ table. That was always kept carefully covered with mosquito-netting. Getting through dinner as soon as I decently could, I hurried up to one of the piazzas and sat watching the boats passing back and forth on the river—every conceivable sort of craft from a tiny dory manned by two half-nude small boys to huge Sound steamers with noisily splashing side-wheels. Among this noisy throng now and then there would pass such strangely colored boats, boats that made me think them the product of some cubist or futurist when in the clutches of a nightmare—camouflage, weird twistings and curves in blues, greens, purples, black, gray, white. It was soon after the disappearance of one such boat that Miss Stafford came out and took the chair next to mine. “How do you like your new position?” she asked, as turning her chair sideways to the piazza railing she put her feet on the rung of my chair. “W-e-l-l,” I hesitated. “I don’t know whether to be amused by it or to hate it—reading the affidavits of draft-evaders. There are so many of them I feel like kicking, yet, at the same time I feel like crying—to find that there are so many persons living in our country, fattening on it, enjoying its benefits and not caring enough for it to fight for its ideals.” “You mustn’t expect everybody to be as keen about doing their bit as you are. Your fingers are never still. You must roll bandages or knit sweaters in your sleep,” she laughed. “What are the other employees like?” “We’re a grab-bag lot. It is just as though the Secretary of War, wishing to set going the machinery of the draft, had thrust his hand into a bag filled with a miscellaneous collection of workers, and would-be workers, and grabbed a handful. The head of the subdepartment in which I work was a saleswoman in a smallish Brooklyn shop, at eight dollars a week. Now she is getting twenty-five, and seems to look upon it as a miracle.” “I can sympathize with her,” the librarian told me. “In the New York public library I only received forty dollars a month. Now I get eighty and the promise of a bonus at Christmas. After you’ve skimped and struggled so long to have your salary doubled in one jump does make you feel inclined to pinch yourself. But when the war is over—you don’t think salaries will go down again, do you?” “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out—whether wages should go still higher, remain on the present level, or fall back to the pre-war figure.” Then I outlined what I had done, and what I planned to do.