 of the chiefs tried to emulate the moyen-age Italians in the arts of smiling poisoning—but they did it so badly; they were as fussily ineffectual as a group of school-boys who hate their teacher. Not “big deals” and vast grim power did they achieve, but merely a constant current of worried insecurity, and they all tended to prove Mrs. Lawrence’s assertion that the office-world is a method of giving the largest possible number of people the largest possible amount of nervous discomfort, to the end of producing the largest possible quantity of totally useless articles.... The struggle extended from the chiefs to the clerks; they who tramped up and down a corridor, waiting till a chief was alone, glaring at others who were also manœuvering to see him; they who studied the lightest remark of any chief and rushed to allies with the problem of, “Now, what did he mean by that, do you think?”... A thousand questions of making an impression on the overlords, and of “House Policy”—that malicious little spirit which stalks through the business house and encourages people to refuse favors.

Una’s share in the actual work at Pemberton’s would have been only a morning’s pastime, but her contact with the high-voltage current of politics exhausted her—and[230] taught her that commercial rewards come to those who demand and take.

The office politics bred caste. Caste at Pemberton’s was as clearly defined as ranks in an army.

At the top were the big chiefs, the officers of the company, and the heads of departments—Mr. Pemberton and his sons, the treasurer, the general manager, the purchasing-agent, the superintendents of the soda-fountain-syrup factory, of the soap-works, of the drug-laboratories, of the toilet-accessories shops, the sales-manager, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross. The Olympian council were they; divinities to whom the lesser clerks had never dared to speak. When there were rumors of “a change,” of “a cut-down in the force,” every person on the office floor watched the chiefs as they assembled to go out to lunch together—big, florid, shaven, large-chinned men, talking easily, healthy from motoring and golf, able in a moment’s conference at lunch to “shift the policy” and to bring instant poverty to the families of forty clerks or four hundred workmen in the shops. When they jovially entered the elevator together, some high-strung stenographer would rush over to one of the older women to weep and be comforted.... An hour from now her tiny job might be gone
