Cheers and applause! And two guys even whistled!
I know I should've been insulted, and maybe I would've been if I were a real girl, but I couldn't help it. I loved it! These men not only thought I was a girl, they thought I was an attractive girl! And no one else, anywhere, had ever thought I was attractive. Certainly no girl ever thought so. And all the boys in school know I'm a boy. If one of them thinks I'm attractive, he's definitely been keeping it to himself. Getting this kind of reaction was intoxicating! I wondered if it would be like this all week.
I was glad that was the last time I'd be going for coffee that day, because there was no way I could top that.
The day continued pleasantly enough, until Mr. Bellam uttered the three frightening, dramatic words every rookie secretary dreads to hear: Take a letter.
Shorthand! That mysterious, noble art which separates the boys from the secretaries. Typing and filling are all well and good, but you're not a real secretary until you can take shorthand.
At this point I cannot do better than to quote Mr. Charles dic-kens:
I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence); and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian Temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb, meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket, stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system; in short, it was almost heart-breaking.
That should give you a small idea of how difficult shorthand is.
I brought in my steno pad and pen, sat down ( not bothering to tuck my skirt beneath my buttocks, because it wasn't necessary in that tight dress ), put on my glasses, crossed my legs, and prepared to take a letter.
And Mr. Bellam took no mercy on me, as he rattled off his words as fast as he could go, composing a letter to the Oregon Iron Ore Corporation regarding a disputed claim they were negotiating. I concentrated as hard as I could. I was keeping up!