"What you are is a kind of educated handyman. Wouldn’t that be it?" Delighted at this discriminating view of my capacities, I faltered that it would be. "Well, we don’t often have a call for your kind of specialty, and yet we do have them sometimes. There might be one to-day, and then again there mightn’t be for another six months. Now you can either go in and wait on the chance, or you can leave your address and we’ll ’phone you if anything should turn up that we think would suit." Encouraged by this kindly treatment and the possibility of a call that day, I opted for going in to wait. "Then come this way." Following the Napoleonic figure down the narrow passageway, I was shown into a little room, where five other men sat with the dismayed, melancholy faces of dogs at a dog-show at minutes when they are not barking. Dismayed and melancholy on my side, I took the seat nearest the door, feeling like a prisoner in the dock or the cell, and wondering what would happen next. Nothing happened next so far as I was concerned, but I had a gratifying leisure in which to look about me. I was obliged to note at once that the Bureau of Domestic and Business Intelligence was chiefly of Domestic. Women crowded the hall, the two large rooms across the way, and the three small ones on our side, except the coop in which we six men were segregated from the gay and chatty throng. Gay and chatty were the words. The tone was that of what French people call a _feeve o’clock_. Girls, for the most part pretty and stylishly dressed, sat in the chairs, perched on the arms of them, grouped themselves in corners, in seeming disregard of the purpose that had brought them there. Unable at first to differentiate between mistresses and maids, I soon learned to detect the former by their careworn faces, shabbier clothes, apologetic arrival, and crestfallen departure. Now and then I caught a few broken phrases, of which the context and significance eluded me. "I told her that before I’d be after washin’ all thim dishes I’d—" "Ah, thin, ye’ll not shtay long in that plaace—" "Says I, ’You’ve got a crust, Mrs. Johnson, to ask me to shtay in when it’s me night—’" "With that I ups and walks away—" All this animation and repartee contrasted oddly with the low, cowed remarks of my companions in the coop, who ventured to exchange observations only at intervals.