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which was perhaps all right. I don't know, but anyhow it didn't seem to me the way it should be done. We'd always done business in New York on the kind of open door policy. The public was welcome. There may have been reasons. I learned afterwards that there were reasons. There were a lot of bad actors around.

I said, “I've already telephoned, but I'm Miss Perkins, the new Secretary of Labor.”

“Oh, you are!,” he said, looking at me in some astonishment. He'd heard about it and had read in the paper that a lady was coming to be Secretary. So he sent my name up, apparently got the okay on it, and we went up.

The outer office, into which we entered from the elevator hall, was a dark, dingy room, with probably just one window in it. This was an apartment house and the rooms were arranged the way an apartment is arranged, and not arranged like offices. It was sort of a dark, gloomy room with one window, in which there were a lot of straight, hard chairs, sort of sitting in rows - not in neat rows, but in some disorder. There were a lot of ashtrays around - unemptied ashtrays and ashes around. There were a lot of crumpled-up papers that hadn't hit the wastebaskets. It had that kind of look.