task.

MG: It was funny, the men at the Standard were friendly in a brother-sister knockabout way, you know. But they just didn’t want to work with women. One of them said to me, ‘You’re going over [to Paris]? What are you going to do? What are you going to live on?’ I said, ‘Writing. I’m going to write.’ He said, ‘What what?’ I said, ‘Stories.’ He said, ‘You know, you’re like an architect who’s never designed a garage.’ That was his view of what I was going to do. But I had a lot of stories I’d never shown anyone, so I fished one out, typed it and sent it to The New Yorker. I didn’t tell anyone. There was no note….And that came back, but with a letter, a very nice letter, saying we can’t use this…but is there anything else you can show us? So I sent a second one and they took it. They paid me six hundred dollars, which was more than I had ever had in the bank. I couldn’t believe it. And I made the great mistake of showing my colleagues at the newspaper my letter of acceptance. It was a great mistake. 

JL: Why?