“I knew something was going on there,” Pauline said returning to her stage whisper. And then, louder still, “Something rotten in Denmark,” just as another girl from the pool walked between them, turning attentively to the sound of Pauline’s voice. Pauline raised her eyes to her. “Oh yes, rotten indeed,” she said and gave the girl a “tell you later” smile.

Mary lifted her own steno book. Only about six pages old, it still had its cool, slim heft and straight cardboard covers. By the end of the month, its pages would be bloated with the pencil strokes of her shorthand, its back would be cracked and its edges softened. And then she would begin another. The march of time.

Pauline’s eyes were still on her, even as Mary found her place and set the open book upright on her desk. The goal, Sister Clare had taught them in school, was shorthand so neat and so legible that anyone can pick up your steno book and type your letters for you. So neat and so legible, she had said, smiling at them from within her wimple, that if you elope on your lunch hour, another secretary can finish your letters for you that afternoon.

She looked over her shoulder, glancing at Pauline, even smiling a little, but Pauline only tilted her head again toward Adele’s back. Mary nodded. This was the kind of moral dilemma Pauline often got her into. Mr. Someone-or-Other, Pauline had mouthed. Adele at lunch with him, crying. But Mr. Who? She turned to her typewriter, Pauline’s eyes still on her. She would like to ask “Who?”-but to do so, in that same mouthing whisper Pauline had used, would be to enter too fully into Pauline’s tale, Pauline’s bitter triumph, and, in some way, into Pauline’s unhappy life.