“The most valuable commodity in business today, if people would only recognize it, is enthusiasm.

“Executives don’t do the work,” Mary Agnes said. “The higher up you get the less you have to do. Until you’re the top man, and then you have to make decisions, and that’s hard. It’s the ones just under the top who have the best deal.”

Eddie encouraged her, and of course she would do anything he wanted, although she couldn’t really see how another few months of classes could make any difference when simply being near Eddie made her so much more aware of everything she read and heard and saw that she felt like a different person.

have to do all Miss Farrow’s extra work like that. You won’t even have time to read for Mr. Shalimar if she keeps piling it up on you. You ought to

Girls like Caroline, who have just finished fifteen uninterrupted years of educational routine, find themselves still dividing the year into seasons in the way they are used to, rather than by the calendar. January the first is not the birth of the new year; September is. Spring is not a time of hope and blossoming; it is a time of leave-taking and

them, I want my job to be one of the happy things in my life.

It was naïve of me, Caroline thought, to think that I could become an editor without stepping on someone’s toes—or perhaps even on his shoulders—and here I am without the least desire to or idea of how to begin.

I’ll never look like that, she thought firmly. No matter what, I’ll never let myself look like that. As long as I have to work, I’m going to get something out of it.

She didn’t really want to forget all of it, because it had all meant happiness at the time it happened. She only wanted to be able someday to remember without finding it painful. That was the trick, to keep all the good things from the past and cast away the ones that hurt.