Explore "Diverging Roads" by Rose Wilder Lane on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In the mornings Helen went to work. The first confusion of the Merchants' Exchange had cleared a little. She began to see a pattern in the fluctuations of the market quotations. January wheat, February wheat, May corn, became a drama to her, and while she snatched the figures from the wire and tossed them to the waiting boy, saw them chalked up on the huge board, and heard the shouts of the brokers, she caught glimpses of the worldwide gamble in lives and fortunes.
But it was only another great spectacle in which she had no part. She was merely a living mechanical attachment to the network of wires. She wanted to tear herself away, to have a life of her own, a life that went forward, instead of swinging like a pendulum between home and the office.