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and an electric plate, and I did quite a lot of cooking on my electric plate.

HENSON: Yes, it can be convenient. Did you like New York City more than Washington, or one or the other? How did you feel about coming back to Washington?

MANN: Well I enjoyed New York City very much when I was living there, but Washington I think is a much nicer place to live. New York is--or was in those days--a very exciting place to be. There's something in the air that just buoyed me up.

HENSON: There was no publishing here at all?

MANN: No, there was no publishing here.

HENSON: In those days you would not have been able to do too much if you'd be working here.

MANN: It didn't occur to me to try for a job on the [[underlined]] National Geographic [[/underlined]], probably couldn't have gotten it, and the [[underlined]] Smithsonian Magazine [[/underlined]], of course, wasn't founded in those days. I had letters of introduction to various publishing houses in New York; the trouble was that to somebody just starting out they didn't pay a salary that you could live on. I said that to one man, I don't know, one of the big editors, and he said, "We know that, but there's so many girls who live here that will work for practically nothing just to say that they've had experience." They lived with their families, and they could work for