Читать книгу A Town Like Alice онлайн

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I knew of several charitable appeals who would have found a first-class shorthand typist, unpaid, a perfect god-send, and I told her so. She was inclined to be critical about those. "Surely, if a thing is really worth while, it'll pay," she said. She evidently had quite a strong business instinct latent in her. "It wouldn't need to have an unpaid secretary."

"Charitable organisations like to keep the overheads down," I remarked.

"I shouldn't have thought organisations that haven't got enough margin to pay a secretary can possibly do very much good," she said. "If I'm going to work at anything, I want it to be something really worth while."

I told her about the almoner's job at a hospital, and she was very much interested in that. "That's much more like it, Mr. Strachan," she said. "I think that's the sort of job one might get stuck into and take really seriously. But I wish it hadn't got to do with sick people. Either you've got a mission for sick people or you haven't, and I think I'm one of the ones who hasn't. But it's worth thinking about."