10g ANGEL PAVE ME NT

off her letters with slightly less contempt and disgust,
rather as if they were no longer the effusions of complete
lunatics but were now merely the work of village idiots.
And she had acquired an assistant. The staff of Twigg
and Dersingham had been enlarged at the beginning
of this week by the appointment of a second typist. Miss
Poppy Sellers had arrived.

The girls who earn their keep by going to offices and
working typewriters may be divided into three classes,
There are those who, like Miss Matfield, are the
daughters of professional gentlemen and so condescend
to the office and the typewriter, who work beneath them
just as girls once married beneath them. There are
those who take it all simply and calmly, because they are
in the office tradition, as Mr. Smeeth's daughter would
have been. Then there are those who rise to the office
and the typewriter, who may not make any more money
than their sisters and cousins who work in factories and
cheap shops-they may easily make considerably less
money—but nevertheless are able to cut superior and
ladylike figures in their respective family circles because
they have succeeded in becoming typists. Poppy be-
longed to this third class. Her father worked on the
Underground, and he and his family of four occupied
half a house not far from Eel Brook Common, Fulham,
that south-western wilderness of vanishing mortar and
bricks that are coming down in the world. This was
not Poppy's first job, for she was twenty and had been
steadily improving herself in the commercial world since
she was fifteen, but it was easily her most important
one. She had been chosen out of a large number of
applicants, had been started at two pounds and ten
shillings a week, and had been told confidentially by