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By last week Labor was not only reconciled to but jubilant over Miss Perkins. She had clearly showed her stripe when she stood up for mill workers at the steel code hearing before NRA (TIME, Aug. 7). That hearing was to have been the first important test of the union v. non-union issue. Madam Secretary Perkins had gone in person to the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Baltimore to talk with employes. She returned to Washington prepared to make vigorous war on the steel industry's proposed company unions—''War bridegrooms" she called them, harking back to the able-bodied citizens who got married to escape the draft. Before the hearings opened the steelmasters, confronted by Madam Secretary Perkins and General Johnson, backed down on the company union provisions of their code, thus permitting the dispute to shift to the coal fields where they hoped to fight it out obliquely. Though her major target thus disappeared, Madam Secretary Perkins had many another serious fault to find with the steel code. She flayed its low pay and long hours so effectively that the steel code was sent back into conference for revisions. Fagged by her efforts and Washington's heat, Miss Perkins dropped out of public sight for a week to catch her breath at Newcastle, Maine. She planned to address the state Federation of Labor at Springfield this week before returning to her Washington office. Madam Secretary Perkins' office is on the seventh floor of the ugly Labor Department building, sandwiched in between a garage and a cheap rooming house. It is a large bare room with north light. Madam Secretary Perkins uses a big flat-topped desk, piled with papers and equipped with two telephones. She arrives at 9 o'clock, eats lunch from a tray, goes out for dinner at 7, returns to work until midnight. Her long hours cost her the services of her first government chauffeur. She usually wears her hat in the office. Her secretary is an efficient, rather bossy person named Frances Jurkowitz—"Miss Jay" to all—one of whose first duties is to ensure her superior as much privacy as possible. Madam Secretary used to serve ginger ale out of her own pocket at press conferences but stopped it when someone remarked that the Government paid for the paper cups. She uses no powder, no rouge, no perfume, dresses mostly in severe blacks and dark browns. Her eyes are dark and brilliant. She has shapely white hands that flutter expressively as she talks. She uses the broad Bostonian "A," never gropes for words. In five months Madam Secretary Perkins has started an elaborate investigation by distinguished citizens to improve the Immigration Bureau; organized the new Federal Employment Service; launched a thoroughgoing survey of the shirt industry to weed out sweatshops; jacked up the Labor Statistics Bureau by appointing able Isador Lubin of Brookings Institute as its chief; secured the services of Charles Wyzanski Jr., onetime editor of the Harvard Law Review, as her solicitor. By her non-political appointments she has done much to raise the tone of her department from the low level to which it had dropped under her immediate predecessor. Miss Perkins' whole career has been a training for her Cabinet job. She was born in Boston 51 years ago. She was graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1902. She worked under Jane Addams at Hull House. In 1911 she witnessed Manhattan's