This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. A twenty-two-year-old, Girton-educated Londoner with no job, little money, and a mind alive to myth turns unemployment into an act of imagination. She sees the city as a place where modern life still echoes the Odyssey, where dragons, princesses, and rescuing St. Georges might appear in ordinary streets, and where adventure depends on the eye of the beholder. But fantasy soon meets necessity: after a personal loss and the end of her support, she must earn her own living. Armed with wit and determination, she enters the harsh world of office work, exaggerates her shorthand speed, survives a humiliating interview, and lands a post in a solicitor's office. There she learns the comic cruelty of modern "female" employment, the deadening routines of clerks and dictation, and the loneliness of choosing survival over charity. Broke and disillusioned, she is briefly electrified by an anarchist vision of shared labor and freedom. A new employer then offers work, but class assumptions and mutual embarrassment complicate the bargain. When she arrives with her own typewriter, practical independence collides with romantic misunderstanding, and the result is both social satire and a tender, awkward beginning.
