ABSTRACT
AT the Woman's Home Companion my work ~ was explained at the beginning. Usually, as I found at Merrill & Baker's, you are allowed to wander in a fog until your natural intelligence, like the sun, clears up mysteries, or, more often, like the moon, dims them forever in a haze. There are people who work for years, going from one place to another, and who seem only to get more muddled as time goes on-until at sixty, bookkeepers all their lives, they are unable to keep a set of books. I shall never forget the slow graying of one man's face as day after day he saw his job slipping away from him. No one has ever explained anything to these people. They have been thrown into the bewildering rr1ysteries of new offices over and over again, and before they can fight their way to an understanding they are pushed into a new tangle. But who is to tell them what to do? Few people know how to explain anything. Unfortunate is he who asks directions on a road, or who tries to discover the principles of a political party from a politician,
. who wants to learn from an artist the theory behind "mixed planes," or from a writer the inspiration of Miss Gertrude Stein.
