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the coffee shop in the building.
    The coffee shop, which doubled as a bar at night, was brightly lighted now and crowded with girls and women who all seemed to be talking at once at the top of their lungs. Six at a time would be

    jammed into a booth, hunched over their hamburgers and dissectmg the other office personnel with venom or hilarity. Four or five harried waitresses in limp uniforms pushed their way through the crowd with plates lined along their arms from wiist to shoulder. They looked like jugglers. Every seat at the curving counter was occupied, mostly by guls, with two or three men scattered among them looking trapped behind their newspapers and greasy platters. April saw one of tliese men standing up to leave, and she maneuvered her way quickly to his vacant seat, feeling as if she were still on the subway. The counter in front of her, with a grease-spotted, balled-up napkin thrown into the plate, a streak of catsup where she tried to put her elbow, and some change scattered in a puddle of spilled water, made her almost lose her appetite. She turned around and saw that the gill sitting next to her was Caroline Bender.
    She was wearing a black suit today and she looked like a model in a fashion magazine. Her dark hair was cut just to her ear lobes, turned under sleekly, with a fringe of bangs, and she was wearing blue eye shadow. April tried to think of something to say to her, glancing at her profile out of the corner of her eye and thinking, How sad she looks. Caroline was staring ahead at the shelf of apple and custard pies and looking right through them. Then she turned her head.
    "Hi," she said, as if she were really glad to see someone she knew, even though they didn't actually know each other. "I know you."
    "We sit next to each other in tiie office, and now here," April said. "We should at least introduce ourselves. I'm April."
    "I'm Caroline." Caroline held out her hand and they shook hands, each of them laughing a little for no particular reason except perhaps embarrassment and relief. "What do you do?"
    The waitiess cleared away the counter in front of them, looking even more repelled than the customers. She put down two gravy-stained menus.
    "I'm a typist, I guess," April said. "But right now I'm working for Mr. Shalimar as his secretary."
    "Good for you. Do you want to be an editor eventually?"
    "Why does everybody ask me that?" April said. "I just took this job because I needed the money, and when I set foot in Mr. Shalimar's office he gave me the tliird degree. Is it true there are all these girls battling for my little job?"

    "That's what I was told at the employment agency. They're all college girls with good educational backgrounds and no experience and they're willing to work for practically nothing. That's why Fabian can pay so little and get away with it. And fifty dollars is good for our kind of job. Most places start their girls at forty."
    "Do you want to be an editor?"
    Caroline smiled. "Everyone asks me that too. I'm working for Miss Farrow temporarily and she looks at me as if I might turn around any minute and bite her jugular vein. But I think I'm beginning to understand why she does. There's something catching about ambition."
    The waitress brought their sandwiches and they ate for a minute or two in silence. "You come from New York, don't you?" April said.
    "Port Blair. That's about forty minutes away."
    "Is that like the country?"
    "Well, most of the Westchester towns are. In fact. Port Blair is the only one that isn't. You have all the disadvantages of a long train ride and then when you get there you have all the disadvantages of a dii-ty little city."
    "Do you live with your family?"
    "That's the only reason for living in a place like Port Blair."
    "I come from Colorado," April said.
    "I know."
    "You know? How do you know?"
    "Mary Agnes told me."
    "Oh, she's funny. She knows everything about everybody." April smoothed back her long tangled hair. "I thought at first you meant