When at seven forty-five Miss Harris appeared upon the porch with her hat and gloves and two-dollar-ticket air, and tripped gaily away in company with Mr. Gross, young Mitchell realized bitterly that the cost of living had increased and that it was up to him to raise his salary or lose his lady.

He recalled Gross’s words at supper-time, and wondered if there really could be a science to business; if there could be anything to success except hard work.  Mr. Comer, in his weekly talks to the office force, had repeatedly said so—­whence the origin of the bookkeeper’s warmed-over wisdom—­but Mitchell’s duties were so simple and so constricted as to allow no opening for science, or so, at least, it seemed to him.  How could he be scientific, how could he find play for genius when he sat at the end of a telephone wire and answered routine questions from a card?  Every day the General Railway Sales Manager gave him a price-list of the commodities which C. & M. handled, and when an inquiry came over the ’phone all he was required, all he was permitted, to do was to read the figures and to quote time of delivery.  If this resulted in an order the Sales Manager took the credit.  An open quotation, on the other hand, made Mitchell the subject of brusque criticism for offering a target to competitors, and when he lost an order he was the goat, not the General Railway Sales Manager.

No one around the office was too lowly to exact homage from the quotation clerk, and no one was tongue-tied in the matter of criticism, hence his position was neither one of dignity nor one that afforded scope for talent in the money-making line.  And yet if salesmanship really were a science, Mitchell reasoned, there must be some way in which even a switchboard operator could profit by acquiring it.  What if he were buckled to the end of a wire?  Human nature is the same, face to face or voice to voice; surely then, if he set his mind to the task, he could make himself more than a mere string of words over a telephone.  Heretofore he had been working wholly with his fingers, his ear-drums, and his vocal cords; he determined henceforth to exercise his intelligence, if he had any.  It was indeed high time, for Miss Harris was undoubtedly slipping away, lured by luxuries no clerk could afford, and, moreover, he, Mitchell, was growing old; in a scant two years he would be able to vote.  He began forthwith to analyze the situation.

There wasn’t much to it.  His telephone calls came almost wholly from the purchasing departments of the various railroads.  Daily requisitions were filled by the stenographers in those railway offices, young ladies who through their long experience were allowed to attend to the more unimportant purchases.  It was in quoting prices on these “pick-ups” that Mitchell helloed for eight hours a day.  Of course no large orders ever came over his wire, but this small business carried an unusual profit for supply houses like Comer & Mathison, and in consequence it was highly prized.