Immediately after supper, therefore, Janet left her friends in the Japanese pagoda on the roof, having arranged to spend the evening in Harry Kelly’s office in flat Number Thirteen, where she proposed to practice on the athlete’s typewriter. Her object was to "increase her speed" so that her most recent position might be made securer. Through the Collegiate Bureau, to which Cornelia had introduced her, she had already been given two opportunities in business offices downtown. She had lost them both within a week, her refinement and charm of manner having been voted poor substitutes for the experience that she still lacked. The fault was not wholly Janet’s. Before she left home, she had taken a course in shorthand and typewriting (in the teeth of her mother’s opposition) at an Evening High School. It was one of those carefully pasteurized courses for which the American educational system is famous; it was showy, time consuming, and totally useless. But how could Janet have known that high-school stenography was as pitiably inadequate to the practical needs of a modern mercantile office as high-school French or German to the practical needs of a tourist on the Continent? Not wanting to get into the bad books of the Collegiate Bureau, Janet was anxious to avert a third discharge. Moreover, her post with the playwright had the intrinsic merit of being more congenial, as well as more lucrative than any she had filled before. Janet was thankful that Cornelia would be occupied with the party, for her efforts to make herself more competent invariably excited her friend to derision. Cornelia, like a true-blue Kipsite, was no devotee of good workmanship. Endowed with the makings of success in any one of half a dozen professions, she had achieved failure in all of them, her inveterate lack of industry and application having botched a promising career in turn as an author, singer, painter, dancer, decorator and dress designer. A born worker, Janet stood in no danger of imitating Cornelia’s business vagaries. She could not have afforded it, anyway. Unlike Cornelia, she had no private income, her only resources being a small bank deposit (a relative’s bequest), which was dwindling with alarming rapidity. Thus, inclination and necessity were as one in spurring her on to making a success of her new post as typist and amanuensis for Howard Madison Grey. *III* The keys of the typewriter were going at a merry gallop when Robert Lloyd, who had a desk in Kelly’s office, came in. "What do you mean by breaking the commandments of the Lorillard Tenements?" he said, putting a sheaf of papers on his desk and getting ready to attack them. "Which commandments, Robert?" "All ten. The first five prohibit any useful work in the daytime on penalty of loss of caste. The second five prohibit the same at night on penalty of excommunication, if not expulsion."