The Heroine: Ann Roberts, idealistic college graduate. "Attractive, with an appealing voice," Ann is a "natural leader," although she has a fear of public speaking.

The Job: Personnel! Both Ann and the author are earnest about the challenge of helping people. "Ann knew that the ways people earn their living, the human problems they face at work, are anything but dull." In the course of her work at a factory, Ann helps a boy named Johnny who wants to go to night school (she persuades him to work for a promotion instead), a worker with man problems (switch to the engaging doll clothes department for distraction) and a high-strung, artistic neurotic who's ruining factory morale (Ann gets her her own line of "character dolls.")

Love Interests: Ann initially falls for a blond smoothie named Blake Walton who's doing some engineering work at her factory, despite the fact that he's obviously a self-absorbed jerk who sees employees as cogs in a machine. In contrast to the suave Blake, there's self-made Chips Simon – "a tall, lean, quick young man with dark hair and dark eyes full of laughter" – who can't take Ann fancy places but shares her passion for good works.

The Villain: The beautiful, callous store buyer, Carole Crane, who, "whatever Nature had given her, had made herself into a work of art."

The Plot: Ann is recruited to do personnel work in Gray's doll factory in New York (a "union shop") where "the employees are almost all women. That's why a girl rather than a man is wanted for their personnel." Ann moves into one of the "residential hotels" where everyone lives in these books. Says Mr. Gray, who is characteristic of the novel's unusually progressive universe,

We try to treat the employees the way we'd want to be treated ourselves, if we were working here…if there's any sign of prejudice, we clamp down hard and fast. We don't permit that.

Ann makes her bones as a sympathetic personnel director, but finds her idealistic and ambitious plans are thwarted by the conservative management, so she moves on.

Her next job is at shmancy Hamilton's department store, where Ann encounters her boss, Mrs. DeLacey (who "was probably sixty but looked forty, with white hair as satiny as her pearls, a trim, slim, commanding woman"), Chips, and her roommate, the wholesome Dorcas. They move into what, the super explains "apologetically," used to be a loft(!) and so is really cheap (!) Ann and Chips come up with a "plan" for employee morale that involves a more human touch and a Junior Board of store employees (which is always capitalized like that.) Unfortunately, the suave Blake shows up with some warring plan that involves firing everyone and treating them like robots. Ann sees his true colors and is shocked at his lack of compassion. Who will prevail?!

At just this crucial juncture, disaster strikes: Ann hires a sullen, insolent girl with a disfigured face and a missing tooth. The girl, Minnie, has a great desire to be around beautiful things, so she goes to work for the nasty Carole Crane, who is cruel to her. Then money and clothes start being stolen – and it turns out it's someone in the store! Minnie confesses defiantly that it's her – that she was hurt in a car accident and never received plastic surgery, that she was mocked and considered an ugly duckling in her family, and so needs money for some charlatan plastic surgeon. Oh, and she won't stop stealing. Ann is so moved by this story that, not only does she not fire Minnie, sullen and insolent though she is, but decides to give her an Extreme Makeover, as well as a second chance. In addition to raising money for a dentist and plastic surgeon, Ann enlists a team of store friends.

Mr. Don cut and waved her hair so that her face no longer looked bony, but slender and clear cut. The make-up expert performed some artfulness that brought Minnie's features into harmony, gave light to her eyes. The buyers of junior misses' clothes put Minnie into tawny colors which lent her warmth. Lily, the model, stayed after hours in order to teach Minnie how to stand, walk and sit with grace. The actress Alicia Weir-Bennett invited Minnie to her apartment on Sunday afternoon and taught her the elements of good diction and a pleasant speaking voice. On orders from the store physician she was eating to gain weight.

Blake and Carole consider this behavior "coddling" and Ann and the forces of good prepare for a showdown in front of the store's president, Miss Parker. Blake and Carole are all for soulless mechanization and have a dazzling array of facts and numbers at their disposal. Will Ann and Chips be outclassed? No! Conquering her fear of public speaking, Ann launches into an eloquent description of Minnie's case and the need for the personal touch. What do you know? Miss Parker used to be poor and love pretty things, too! She approves of Ann's approach of giving makeovers to sullen new employees who've stolen hundreds of dollars in merch! Blake and Carole are routed and left fuming; Ann and Chips, triumphant, get engaged. In Ann's words,

It's so simple. People, employees, are the core of any business. No number of machines or methods or merchandise are of any use unless you have efficient, willing employees. They're human beings. You have to treat them humanely.

Earlier: A Career Romance For Young Moderns: A Campaign For Pam
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Designed By Stacey
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Dreams To Shatter
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: A Special Kind of Love
Career Romance For Young Moderns: Patti Lewis, Home Economist
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Lee Devins, Copywriter

We meet Patti sliding a pan of rolls into a demonstration oven, doing a presentation for National Electric.

"Be careful," she warns herself as she talks about waffles. "These men were all in the grain industry and they were holding their convention here in Chicago to promote the sales of the grain they grew and milled throughout the Middle West. She'd better do justice to their fruits of the soil or she wouldn't go very far as a home economist."

Things continue. "On yellow paper plates, with a scalloped yellow paper napkin, Patti placed a hot buttered roll, a cheese tartlet, and a small ham cornucopia." However, one insolent young man in the audience keeps lobbing insolent questions at her, about her rolling pin, her methods, and the point of her work.

"With dignity, and a trace of peppery temper, Patti Lewis explained why and how nutrition is as vital a field as nursing. Getting full nourishment out of foods — educating the public in good food habits — advising food manufacturers what Mrs. Public wants and can afford to buy - preventing waste and spoilage of food — in short, the job was to help all sorts of Americans to live healthily, economically, and well."

The jerk is still skeptical — and his skepticism is confirmed when her Lady Baltimore Cake fails to rise!

Patti is humiliated. He reminds her of her ex. "What right had Carl or the heckler to take such a dim view of this feminine profession, and of feminine talents in general?...Any challenge to her work did challenge her value as a person. She believed in her field so wholeheartedly!" Her training, we learn, has involved "chemistry, bacteriology, physiology, psychology, sociology and economics, to say nothing of cookery, administration and journalism.

Her work for National Electric involves writing recipe booklets, answering consumer mail ("will you suggest a menu for a midnight buffet supper?"), and demonstrations. "What she really longed to do was creative or experimental cooking: to devise new food products."

Instead, she's given work making cakes for Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays. "She'd had the idea of tiny individual layer cakes. With different sides iced in red (strawberry), white (vanilla, of course), and blue (only vailla with a touch of tint, but who cared?), they had genuine novelty."

Next, she's transferred to the editorial department, writing cookbooks and copy for TV. "She was rather awed by the stunning high-voltage women in these penthouse offices." Work in the recipe test kitchen involves "three variations on a tomato juice cocktail" of which a "semifrozen one turned out to be exciting."

Then, just when everything is going well, Patty encounters the furious guy again at a demonstration. This time he's accompanied by a languid beauty in furs. Patti manages to convince him of the wisdom of marinating lamb chops in French dressing, but the tension still seethes.

Patti accepts a job working for Mid-West Flour in another state as their in-house development and home economics head. Imagine her shock, upon arriving, to find she's working for Jim Wheeler, the insolent skeptic! Seems he's the reluctant heir to Mid-West, who resents being stuck in Indian City. But Patti soon finds she has bigger problems than the disturbingly attractive Jim Wheeler. Leo Feist, the manager, thinks she's a young flibberdigibit with newfangled notions. She also has to find a way to sell more of Mid-West's biscuit mix.

Meanwhile, she fixes up the gloomy test kitchen with new curtains and "an inexpensive wallpaper in a Pennsylvania Dutch pattern" and moves into the adorable apartment that's thrown in with the job (standard in these books). She gets to work in earnest on the biscuit mix, cranking out batch after batch of biscuits and soliciting comments from her colleagues. "Did they keep well? Could they be reheated, and not be dry or tough?" She also works to improve the packaging: "Did it keep the mix fresh? Was it easy to open, and close again?" She decides to promote the mix with a buffet supper "featuring a delicious chicken pie with biscuit crust, and fruit shortcake." Jim Wheeler, increasingly besotted with the vision of Patti in her trim white apron, pronounces the idea "slick."

The supper is a success! Jim is thrilled and love begins to bud. But then there's a fiscal crisis! The grim fuddy-duddy is triumphant and wants the little company to be bought out by a big mill — unless they can lower their prices and make a superior biscuit mix? Can Patti create a lower-cost version of the mix, using soy flour? She can! A government order for thousands of pounds of mix gets them out of the hole and brings her glory. Jim, now a devoted miller, confesses his love.

"What more vital work than to bring her scientific skills to the aid of hungry peoples? What more urgent work than preventing spoilage of food and easing famine? For this was no temporary situation, and Patti knew much of the world's unrest and war stemmed from hunger."

And so, one imagines, dozens of starry-eyed high-school girls ventured into the important world of Home Economics, ready to make biscuits, win the boss's heart, and feed the word.

Earlier: Career Romance For Young Moderns: A Measure Of Love