“Though there are different kinds of chorus girls,” she reflected.  “Some wanted to be somewhere else.  Some hope to be somewhere else.  And some swaggeringly make it plain that they wouldn’t be anywhere else if they could.  I’d hate to have to say which kind is the most sad.”

“Katie,” he said—­he never spoke her name save in that timid, lingering way—­“don’t you think you’re rather over-emphasizing the sadness?”

Two girls passed them, laughing boisterously.  “Perhaps so.  I suppose I am.  And yet nothing seems to me sadder than some of the people who would be astonished at suggesting sadness.”

That afternoon they were going to the telephone office.  Katie had been there early in the summer, to the central office and all the exchanges, but wanted to go again.  And Mann said he would like to go with her and see what the thing looked like.

The officials were cordial to them at the telephone office, seeming pleased to exhibit and explain.  And it seemed that with their rest rooms and recreation rooms, their various things to contribute to comfort and pleasure, their pride was justified.

But when they were in the immense room where several hundred girls were sitting before the boards, rest rooms and recreation rooms did not seem to reach.  They walked behind a long row, their guide proudly calling attention to the fact that not one of those girls turned her head to look at them.  He called it discipline—­concentration.  Katie, looking at the tense faces, was thinking of the price paid for that discipline.  Many of the girls were very young, some not more than sixteen.  They preferred taking them young, said the guide; they were easier to break in if they had never done anything else.

There was not the shadow of a doubt that they were being “broken in.”  So clearly was that demonstrated that Katie wondered what there would be left for them to be broken in to after they had been thoroughly broken in to that.  Walking slowly behind them, looking at every girl as a possible Ann, she wondered what they would have left for a Something Somewhere.  She remembered the woman who wore the white furs saying it “got on her nerves” and wondered what kind of nerves they would be it wouldn’t “get on.”  The thing itself seemed a mammoth nervous system, feeding on other nervous systems, lesser sacrificed to greater.

Her fancy reached out to all the things that at that instant were going through those cords.  Plans were being made for dinner, for motoring that evening, for many pleasant, restful things.  Many little red lights, with many possible invitations, were insistently dancing before tired eyes just then.  They seemed endless—­those demands of life—­demands of life before which other demands of life were slowly going down.

She and Mann were alone for the minute.  “And yet,” she turned to him, after following his glance to a girl’s tense, white face, “what can they do?  The company, I mean.  One must be fair.  They pay better than most things pay, seem more interested in the girls.  What more can we ask?”