 office to a point where it offered few beautiful surprises.

And she knew the tactics of Mr. Troy Wilkins.

All managers—“bosses”—“chiefs”—have tactics for keeping discipline; tricks which they conceive as profoundly hidden from their underlings, and which are intimately known and discussed by those underlings.... There are the bosses who “bluff,” those who lie, those who give good-fellowship or grave courtesy in lieu of wages. None of these was Mr. Wilkins. He was dully honest and clumsily paternal. But he was a roarer, a grumbler; he bawled and ordained, in order to encourage industry and keep his lambs from asking for “raises.” Thus also he tried to conceal his own mistakes; when a missing letter for which everybody had been anxiously searching was found on his own desk, instead of in the files, he would blare, “Well, why didn’t you tell me you put it on my desk, heh?” He was a delayer also and, in poker patois, a passer of the buck. He would feebly hold up a decision for weeks, then make a whole campaign of getting his[158] office to rush through the task in order to catch up; have a form of masculine-commuter hysterics because Una and Bessie didn’t do the typing in a miraculously short time.... He never cursed; he was an ecclesiastical believer that one of the chief aims of man is to keep from saying those mystic words “hell” and “damn”; but he could make “darn it” and “why in tunket” sound as profane as a gambling-den.... There was included in Una’s duties the pretense of believing that Mr. Wilkins was the greatest single-handed villa architect in Greater New York. Sometimes it nauseated her. But often he was rather pathetic in his shaky desire to go on having faith in his superseded ability, and she would willingly assure him that his rivals, the boisterous young firm of Soule, Smith & Fissleben, were frauds.

All these faults and devices of Mr. Troy Wilkins Una knew. Doubtless he would have been astonished to hear that fact, on evenings in his plate-racked, much-raftered, highly built-in suburban dining-room, when he discoursed to the admiring Mrs. Wilkins and the mouse-like little Wilkinses on the art of office discipline; or mornings in the second smoker of the 8.16 train, when he told the other lords of the world that “these stenographers are all alike—you simply can’t get’em to learn system.”

It is not recorded whether Mr. Wilkins also knew Una’s faults—her habit of falling a-
