We who had entered were ignored.  We might have been ghosts, invisible and inaudible.  Even the supervisors, less-young women set in authority, did not turn to glance at us as they moved restlessly peering behind the stools.  And yet somehow I could hear the delicate shoulders of all the young women saying, without speech:  “Here come these tyrants and taskmasters again, who have invented this exercise which nearly but not quite cracks our little brains for us!  They know exactly how much they can get out of us, and they get it.  They are cleverer than us and more powerful than us; and we have to submit to their discipline.  But—­” And afar off I could hear:  “What are you going to wear to-night?” “Will you dine with me to-night?” “I want two seats.”  “Very well, thanks, and how is Mrs....?” “When can I see you to-morrow?” “I’ll take your offer for those bonds.” ...  And I could see the interiors of innumerable offices and drawing-rooms....  But of course I could hear and see nothing really except the intent drone and quick gesturing of those completely absorbed young creatures in the dim radiance, on stools precisely similar.

I understood why the telephone service was so efficient.  I understood not merely from the demeanor of the long row of young women, but from everything else I had seen in the exact and diabolically ingenious ordering of the whole establishment.

We were silent for a time, as though we had entered a church.  We were, perhaps unconsciously, abashed by the intensity of the absorption of these neat young women.  After a while one of the guides, one of the inscrutable beings who had helped to invent and construct the astounding organism, began in a low voice on the forlorn hope of making me comprehend the mechanism of a telephone-call and its response.  And I began on the forlorn hope of persuading him by intelligent acting that I did comprehend.  We each made a little progress.  I could not tell him that, though I genuinely and humbly admired his particular variety of genius, what interested me in the affair was not the mechanics, but the human equation.  As a professional reader of faces, I glanced as well as I could sideways at those bent girls’ faces to see if they were happy.  An absurd inquiry!  Do I look happy when I’m at work, I wonder!  Did they then look reasonably content?  Well, I came to the conclusion that they looked like most other faces—­neither one thing nor the other.  Still, in a great establishment, I would sooner search for sociological information in the faces of the employed than in the managerial rules.

“What do they earn?” I asked, when we emerged from the ten-atmosphere pressure of that intense absorption. (Of course I knew that no young women could possibly for any length of time be as intensely absorbed as these appeared to be.  But the illusion was there, and it was effective.)