I learned that even the lowest beginner earned five dollars a week.  It was just the sum I was paying for a pair of clean sheets every night at a grand hotel.  And that the salary rose to six, seven, eight, eleven, and even fourteen dollars for supervisors, who, however, had to stand on their feet seven and a half hours a day, as shop-girls do for ten hours a day; and that in general the girls had thirty minutes for lunch, and a day off every week, and that the Company supplied them gratuitously with tea, coffee, sugar, couches, newspapers, arm-chairs, and fresh air, of which last fifty fresh cubic feet were pumped in for every operator every minute.

“Naturally,” I was told, “the discipline is strict.  There are test wires....  We can check the ‘time elements.’ ...  We keep a record of every call.  They’ll take a dollar a week less in an outside place—­for instance, a hotel....  Their average stay here is thirty months.”

And I was told the number of exchanges there were in New York, exactly like the one I was seeing.

A dollar a week less in a hotel!  How feminine!  And how masculine!  And how wise for one sort of young woman, and how foolish for another!...  Imagine quitting that convent with its guaranteed fresh air, and its couches and sugar and so on, for the rough hazards and promiscuities of a hotel!  On the other hand, imagine not quitting it!

Said the demigod of the electrical world, condescendingly:  “All this telephone business is done on a mere few hundred horse-power.  Come away, and I’ll show you electricity in bulk.”

And I went away with him, thoughtful.  In spite of the inhuman perfection of its functioning, that exchange was a very human place indeed.  It brilliantly solved some problems; it raised others.  Excessively difficult to find any fault whatever in it!  A marvelous service, achieved under strictly hygienic conditions—­and young women must make their way through the world!  And yet—­Yes, a very human place indeed!

* * * * *

The demigods of the electric world do not condescend to move about in petrol motor-cars.  In the exercise of a natural and charming coquetry they insist on electrical traction, and it was in the most modern and soundless electric brougham that we arrived at nightfall under the overhanging cornice-eaves of two gigantic Florentine palaces—­just such looming palaces, they appeared in the dark, as may be seen in any central street of Florence, with a cinema-show blazing its signs on the ground floor, and Heaven knows what remnants of Italian aristocracy in the mysterious upper stories.  Having entered one of the palaces, simultaneously with a tornado of wind, we passed through long, deserted, narrow galleries, lined with thousands of small, caged compartments containing “transformers,” and on each compartment was a label bearing always the same words:  “Danger, 6,600 volts.”  “Danger, 6,600 volts.”  “Danger, 6,600 volts.”