midday
`` Why , I only thought they would n't be back in their offices from luncheon , '' explained the English girl . `` When you know a little more about N'York , '' replied Miss Hampshire , whose manner was involuntarily less mellow when she had hooked a fish , `` you 'll see why it could never be run as it is along _ those _ lines . Many of our most prominent business men consider a piece of pie with a tumbler of milk a good and sufficient lunch , and it takes them five minutes to swallow it . '' Primed with this information and intricate instructions concerning street cars -LRB- a child once burned dreads a taxi -RRB- , Winifred started out soon after her own midday meal , eaten in a basement dining-room . She went first to see the editor ; for somehow newspaper reporting seemed more congenial to the vivid New York climate than singing in a church choir , and the hugeness of the _ To-day and To-morrow _ building turned her again into a worm . It did not so much scrape the sky as soar into it , and when she timidly murmured the words `` editorial offices '' she was shot up to the top in an elevator as in a perpendicularly directed catapult . When the fearsome thing stopped she had the sensation that her head alone had arrived , the rest had been shed on the way , but in a large open space furnished with roll-top desks and typewriters and men and girls she was looked at as though nothing unusual had happened .