I was looking around dreamily. "I worked here twenty-five years ago. In the basement."

"You worked in the basement!" Edward exclaimed. "What did you do-- shovel coal?"

"I was the receptionist. All I had to do was look cordial."

He said it was the first time he'd ever heard of a receptionist being kept in the basement, and he even looked more skeptical when I explained it was Anne Morgan's idea. "You mean J.P.Morgan's sister?"

That was who I meant all right. She was noted for her philanthropies, and as a fighter for women's rights, and I guess she lumped the two together when she founded the New York Working Women's Association and built a combination hotel-clubhouse for members, most of them single women in business. Officially, it was called the W.W.A., but many of the people who worked there referred to it simply as Anne Morgan's Club.

She was a great believer in keeping fit, which is how I happened to be in the basement, sneezing and smiling. The entire Physical Education Department was down there: swimming pool, gymnasium, and locker rooms with billowing serge gym bloomers and grey tank suits as shapeless as ectoplasm. Anne Morgan used the pool sometimes, but more often she just brought visitors down to show them how we were teeming with healthy physical exercise. She was a tall, wide-striding, briskly good-humored woman in hand-knit suits that must have been blocked on a barber pole. she wore her white hair neatly chopped, and when she spoke, at least to minor employees like myself, it was like a cannon firing a friendly salute, boom, boom, boom. In a basement, a cannon sounds louder and longer.

-from "Unmixed Company"