[Gutenberg 430] • The Grain of Dust: A Novel

Dorothea Hallowell is a clerk in a New York law office. She's hard working and pleasant, but she has an undeserved reputation for being rather loose. It's nothing but office gossip -- and still, she becomes fed up with. If she's going to be treated like that, she ought at least to reap the rewards of it. . . . So she allows Frederick Norman, a lawyer in the office and a married man, to pursue her. But what she finds in the end is not the vicarious giddiness that she thought she'd feel -- quite the contrary, it's something much more sinister. . . .

Excerpt from The Grain of Dust: A Novel

Into the offices of Lockyer, Sanders, Benchley, Lockyer & Norman, corporation lawyers, there drifted on a December afternoon a girl in search of work at stenography and typewriting. The firm was about the most important and most famous - radical orators often said infamous - in New York. The girl seemed, at a glance, about as unimportant and obscure an atom as the city hid in its vast ferment. She was blonde - tawny hair, fair skin, blue eyes. Aside from this hardly conclusive mark of identity there was nothing positive, nothing definite, about her. She was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither grave nor gay. She gave the impression of a young person of the feminine gender - that, and nothing more. She was plainly dressed, like thousands of other girls, in darkish blue jacket and skirt and white shirt waist. Her boots and gloves were neat, her hair simply and well arranged. Perhaps in these respects - in neatness and taste - she did excel the average, which is depressingly low.