The Best of Everything Read Free Page A

one."
    "Oh, but I only have an hour for lunch," Caroline said.
    "She doesn't come back until three-thirty. She'll never know. Just get back by three."
    "How does she get any work done?" Caroline asked. "Or is that a naive question?"
    "Executives don't do the work," Mary Agnes said. "The higher up you get the less you have to do. Until you're the top man, and then you have to make decisions, and that's hard. It's the ones just under the top who have the best deal."
    When Mary Agnes had gone off in the direction of the subway Caroline strolled down Fifth Avenue looking around. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere, meet someone, do some-

    thing. The girls trying to do some hasty lunch-hour shopping in the department stores, the messengers shuffling along to get the envelope or the package to its destination before the recipient went out to lunch, tibe executives rushing to embrace that first Martini. On the steps of St, Patrick's Cathedral were some tourists, focusing leather-encased cameras on each other, beaming in front of the historic architecture. A flock of pigeons rose up with a dry, snapping sound from the top step, like white wood shavings flung into the cold air. The sun had come out and everything was glittering.
    Caroline was suddenly taken with excitement. It was her first day at a new job, she was going to make fifty dollars a week. It seemed like a fortune. She was still living with her parents, in Port Blair, New York, and she had almost no expenses except for clothes, lunches and commuter tickets. Perhaps by summer she would get a raise, and then she could rent an apartment in New York with another girl. There must be a hundred girls working at Fabian, she thought, and I'll certainly find someone I'll really like who'll want to share an apartment with me. She jostled her way along with the stream of people, blinking in the unexpected winter sunshine, and she realized that she had been smiling, because a delivery boy in a leather jacket grinned at her and said, "Hi Beautiful."
    He thinks he's being so fresh, she thought; if I turned around and said, Hello, yourself, he'd probably faint. She laughed. She was still used to the friendly informality of a small college town, where in the fifteen minutes it took you to walk from the dorms to classes your face could get stiff from smiling greetings to all your casual acquaintances. And of course in Port Blair everyone knew everyone else, if not in person, then at least through gossip.
    She found the grimy-looking gray building that housed the Social Security ofiice and went upstairs. She realized that she had forgotten to stop for lunch, but she was too excited to eat anyway. The small room was crowded with people, sitting dully in rows of straight-backed wooden chairs. She took her place at the end of the line and looked around.
    What a group of unhappy-looking people! All of them looked as if they were waiting in line to pour out their troubles to Miss Lonelyhearts. Perhaps it was only because they had all been waiting in line for a long time, boredom has a tendency to bring out the worst in people's faces. She looked at their clothes. Most of them

    were frayed at the cuff and run down at the heel. It made her feel self-conscious with her raccoon collar and clean kid gloves. Where were all the happy, comfortably-off people? Didn't they work? Or were the people in this room the ones who had not worked for a long time? Perhaps she had come to the Social Security office for failures, and there was another one uptown or downtown for successes.
    I'll never look like that, she thought firmly. No matter what, I'll never let myself look like that. As long as I have to work, I'm going to get something out of it. These people look as if they have—just jobs. They don't look as if they particularly like their work, they look as if they can't help themselves. I don't want to look like them, I want my job to be one of the happy things in my life.
    "Next," said the