The women behind the desks were all alike. Old or young, skinny or well-padded, they were on the inside. Smug, at being employed—with the out-of-work at their mercy. She wanted to strike them—and she wanted to run and hide from them.

But she had set out to look for a job, and she was going to get one or know the reason why. For Erika, she reminded herself. Not that Erika had suggested it by so much as the flicker of an eyelash. The rent was paid. There was food in the cupboard. This morning she even found a dollar bill and a new pack of cigarettes in the pocket of her tweed coat. Erika must have put them there. This silent thoughtfulness was the clincher. She had to find a job, not because Erika insisted on it but because she didn't.

She stood afraid but determined in front of the State Employment Agency, where the jobs might not be so good but there was no fee to pay. Here, they had to sign you up no matter how unpromising you might seem. They all came here, shaky bums from the local rescue mission, Negroes who had found a college education no shield against white stupidity, migrant Mexicans and Puerto Ricans looking proud and antagonistic, fat middle-aged ladies with tired feet, looking for day work, scared kids who had quit school at sixteen and were finding out that the world didn't care what happened to them. The handicapped, the displaced, the leftovers.

I don't belong with these people, she thought resentfully. I'll go to a private agency and get something interesting or at least something with decent pay. Secretary, receptionist, dictaphone typist. Her reflection in the plate glass window was reassuring. The coat was getting shabby but it had been all right in its day, and her hair was neat. She looked intelligent and capable. Her hands hardly shook at all.

Still, she had been to the private agencies, only four or five in this middle-sized city. The women with the index files were polite, but they looked at her that way when they found that she'd already registered and been placed and then had left the perfectly good jobs they had found for her. A job hopper. And not well enough dressed, really, for a good office.

She tightened her fists in her coat pockets, and went in.

The big bare room was bright with overhead globes and echoing with voices. There were no magazines here, no upholstered chairs, no effort to make the clients feel at home. The chairs were the tan folding kind found in cheap funeral parlors and the floor was bare except for cigarette butts. There was a railed enclosure up front to separate the job-hunters from the job-givers. The Civil Service workers sat behind their typewriters looking bored. A good racket, Kate mused, they never get fired and there's a good pension. How do you get on Civil Service?

She sat down, gathering her coat around her so it wouldn't drag on the floor. A fiercely moustached little Mexican fruit picker in patched overalls gave her a startled look and inched away.