The Broken Teaglass Read Online Free PDF Page A

here.”
    I watched Anna as she continued to work the copy machine. She looked fairly content.
    “Anna’s very sweet,” Mona added, whispering. “Don’t hold it against her.”
    “Do the boss editors know?”
    She shrugged. “I’m not exactly in the inner circle yet. Probably they noticed a long time ago. I’m told it’s not the only trick picture she’s done. Clifford’s the one who showed it to me.”
    “Who’s Clifford?” I asked.
    “He sits right near you. Heavyset guy, in his forties, curly blond hair?”
    “Don’t think I’ve met him.”
    “Well, maybe someday he’ll circle around to your side of the island and you’ll get to see him. You’ll hear him first, probably. Clifford’s pretty vocal, as far as editors go. But he’s nice, once you get to know him. Very normal. Maybe the most normal editor here. Second to Grace, of course.”
    “I’ve met Grace. She introduced herself on my first day.”
    “Of course she did. See? The most normal. Just a regular old nice person. And always good for gossip when you’re desperate to get away from your desk for a little conversation.”
    Mona paused.
    “So …,” I said. “What about you? What did you study before you came here?”
    “Classics. Greek and Latin. I went to Middlebrook.”
    “Oh?”
    Hmm. Middlebrook. The expensive women’s college about thirty minutes outside of Claxton, where rich girls went in wearing cashmere and emerged months later with short haircuts and septum rings and T-shirts that said
Subvert the Dominant Paradigm
. I tried not to wonder if Mona had ever kissed another girl. It just didn’t seem like the right thought for a young wordsmith to be having.
    “You from around here originally?” I asked.
    “No. Ohio. But I’m keeping you from your letter. I should stop talking your ear off and let you get back to it.”
    “Gee, thanks.”
    “Do you want any advice for answering that thing?”
    “Yes,” I admitted.
    “First of all, you should explain to him that in general both are accepted plural forms of ‘-trix’ words. But you might want to just tell him a little about what kind of evidence we have in the file for ‘editrix’ and ‘dominatrix,’ too. Just to shut him up. Just look in the file at ‘dominatrix’ and ‘editrix’ if you need something to beef up the letter. Have you had a chance to poke around in the cit file on your own yet?”
    “No … I’ve only seen the citations that Dan’s given me to look at.”
    Mona pushed her chair back and stood up.
    “Come on, then. You know you can look in there and take stuff out whenever you want, right?”
    She led me into one of the rows of little wooden file drawers, pulled out one of the narrow drawers, and heaved it onto the top of the cabinet. Then she started flipping through the tightly packed citations.
    “You know, correspondence is the one task that really gives you an excuse to fool around in the cit file. So often, with other stuff, you can just use the database. Dan told you that they’ve got the most recent cits all computerized, right?”
    “Yeah … since 1994, right?”
    “Yeah. Maybe someday they’ll get around to computerizing all the millions of old cits too. Seems like that’d be a smart idea, don’t you think? What if the place goes up in flames someday, you know?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Here.” She held up a thin pile of citations. “That’s what we have for ‘editrix.’ Not much. That might actually be why both plurals are listed. Both are standard plurals for that ending. But it’s not really widespread enough to even have established a more commonly used plural. You know what I mean?”
    “I think so,” I said.
    She started flipping through the cits. “You’ll probably find at least a couple varied plurals for ‘editrix’ in the cits…. Let’s see now … If it’s in the dictionary, some editors at some point had cits to back it up. Everything’s in the dictionary for a reason. Jared Houston just doesn’t ever