"If the various firms and professions who employ girls as typists were to give them an insight into the business, whatever it might be, it would add enormously to the enthusiasm of the worker. In America they do this very often. The wonderful Miss Alice Duckin, the lady skyscraper builder, was once a typist. When she entered the firm they allowed her full scope to develop, and she mastered the building trade and is now the chief partner of Messrs Duckin and Lass. There is one firm of lawyers in London who allow their typists to attend the Law Courts, and give them work to do which is usually reserved for men. Only under such conditions can the profession expand." There is often a chance for a secretary in a newspaper office to develop into a journalist. But there are instances when the private secretary, who begins writing for the paper on which she is employed, is told that she was engaged not as a contributor but as an efficient secretary. One girl who had been for ten years private secretary to a literary man in London, horrified her relatives, and gave her employer a shock, by suddenly throwing up her much-envied post and entering herself at a hospital for a particularly strenuous kind of nursing. Her salary as secretary was 35s. a week; she had a comfortable room of her own to work in, a good annual holiday, and other blessings. Her chief said "good morning" and "good evening" to her, but she saw no one else, and frequently she had technical German translations in the evenings, for which she got nothing extra. Her chief did not know German, and thought she did the translations as easily as she wrote shorthand. Her whole work was moderately interesting, but the dullness of her life became insupportable. Another private secretary at the end of fifteen years in an excellent post, opened a tea-shop. An Edinburgh woman sends the following interesting statement:-- "Secretarial work seems to me one of the most congenial for educated women. In Edinburgh the prospects are excellent. The headmasters and mistresses of all the large schools, medical men, dentists, university professors, managing editors of our great printing and publishing houses, several of whom are editing encylopaedias, need a fair number of women secretaries. And there is not a sufficient supply for the law offices of which Edinburgh has such a large number. "The conditions are in need of some kind of organised supervision, particularly where everything depends on an individual employer. In my first post with a medical specialist, for instance, my time was never my own; my work began at 9 and often did not end at midnight. Sunday work was quite common; there were no Saturday afternoons off, but I had free hours here and there which it was impossible to utilise.