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By Root 1424 0

was given the Oklahoma papers to read. The boss went over her papers before they went to the cutter and pointed out her mistakes. When she got expert enough not to need checking, the Pennsylvania papers were added. Soon after she was given the New York state papers, and now had three states to read. By the end of August, she was reading more papers and marking more items than any other reader in the Bureau. She was fresh to the work, anxious to please, had strong clear eyes (she was the only reader not wearing glasses), and had developed a photographic eye very quickly. She could take in an item at a glance and note immediately whether it was something to mark. She read between a hundred and eighty and two hundred newspapers a day. The next best reader averaged from a hundred to a hundred and ten papers.

Yes, Francie was the fastest reader in the Bureau—and the poorest paid. Although she had been raised to ten dollars a week when she went on reading, her runner-up received twenty-five dollars a week and the other readers received twenty. Since Francie never became friendly enough with the girls to be taken into their confidence, she had no way of knowing how grossly underpaid she was.

Although Francie liked reading newspapers and was proud to earn ten dollars a week, she was not happy. She had been excited about going to work in New York. Since such a tiny thing as a flower in a brown bowl at the library had thrilled her so, she expected that the great city of New York would thrill her a hundred times more. But it was not so.

The Bridge had been the first disappointment. Looking at it from the roof of her house, she had thought that crossing it would make her feel like a gossamer-winged fairy flying through the air. But the actual ride over the Bridge was no different than the ride above the Brooklyn streets. The Bridge was paved in sidewalks and traffic roads like the streets of Broadway and the tracks were the same tracks. There was no different feeling about the train as it went over the Bridge. New York was disappointing. The buildings were higher and the crowds thicker; otherwise it was little different from Brooklyn. From now on, would all new things be disappointing, she wondered?

She had often studied the map of the United States and crossed its plains, mountains, deserts, and rivers in her imagination. And it had seemed a wonderful thing. Now she wondered whether she wouldn’t be disappointed in that, too. Supposing, she thought, she was to walk across this great country. She’d start out at seven in the morning, say, and walk westward. She’d put one foot down in front of the other to cover distance, and, as she walked to the west, she’d be so busy with her feet and with the realization that her footsteps were part of a chain that had started in Brooklyn, that she might think nothing at all of the mountains, rivers, plains, and deserts she came upon. All she’d notice was that some things were strange because they reminded her of Brooklyn and that other things were strange because they were so different from Brooklyn. “I guess there is nothing new, then, in the world,” decided Francie unhappily. “If there is anything new or different, some part of it must be in Brooklyn and I must be used to it and wouldn’t be able to notice it if I came across it.” Like Alexander the Great, Francie grieved, being convinced that there were no new worlds to conquer.

She adapted herself to the split-second rhythm of the New Yorker going to and from work. Getting to the office was a nervous ordeal. If she arrived one minute before nine, she was a free person. If she arrived a minute after, she worried because that made her the logical scapegoat of the boss if he happened to be in a bad mood that day. So she learned ways of conserving bits of seconds. Long before the train ground to a stop at her station, she pushed her way to the door to be one of the first expelled when it slid open. Out of the train, she ran like a deer, circling the crowd to be the first up the stairs leading to the street. Walking to the office, she kept close