Barrows believe he is a heroin addict and a potential homicidal maniac. She believes him when he tells her he is preparing a bomb to blow up their boss. She becomes highly indignant and insists that Mr. Martin leave her apartment at once.

What follows is more effective than Mr. Martin could have planned. He doesn't have to commit a murder, and he gets rid of the vulgar woman who has been threatening to destroy his precious filing department. Mr. Fitweiler cannot believe her accusations when she goes into his office the next morning. He has known Mr. Martin for over twenty years and knows he doesn't drink or smoke. He certainly wouldn't be shooting up heroin! It is Mr. Martin who is in the catbird seat when it comes to a showdown with Ulgine Barrows. She loses her cool completely and calls their employer an old fool. She has to be dragged out of the office by two strong men, and that is the end of her days at F & S. 

Mr. Fitweiler hired Mrs. Barrows at his special assistant without knowing anything about her. Fitweiler, who is head of the big New York-based F&S company, is getting old and seems to be gradually losing his mind. He is going to a psychiatrist for help. His hiring Ulgine Barrows as his assistant was obviously a big mistake. Mr. Martin reflects:

A week later he had introduced her as his special adviser. On that day confusion got its foot in the door.

She has created disruption throughout the executive offices by her reorganization schemes. In order to show her irrationality, the narrator keeps quoting the "gibberish" Mrs. Barrows is always spouting . She repeats phrases she has heard on the radio spoken by a popular baseball sportscaster named Red Barber. They include the following:

"Are you lifting the oxcart out of the ditch? Are you tearing up the pea patch? Are you hollering down the rain barrel?: Are you scraping around the bottom of the pickle barrel? Are you sitting in the catbird seat?"

"Sitting in the catbird seat" meant "sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him." Ulgine Barrows has been driving Martin crazy with these mindless questions. She seems to be trying to learn to be "one of the boys" in an era in which women were entering the American workforce in large numbers and moving up to positions of power. But Martin treats her with friendly tolerance until it appears that she has her eye on his filing department. On the afternoon of Monday, November 2, 1941 she had bounced into Mr. Martin's office and asked, "Do you really need all these filing cabinets?"

Mr. Martin could no longer doubt that the finger was on his beloved department. 

He addresses an imaginary jury in his head:

"Gentlemen of the jury," he said to himself, "I demand the death penalty for this horrible person."

The reader expects to be reading a perfect-crime murder story; but Mr. Martin eventually thinks of a more subtle way of getting rid of Mrs. Barrows. Mr. Fitweileer discharges her because she thinks the staid and loyal company man Mr. Martin could have said and done the things of which she accuses him, including getting "coked to the gills" on heroin, and therefore the woman must be mad. It turns out that Mr. Martin was correct in foreseeing that, "Her pickaxe was on the upswing, poised for the first blow." After Mrs. Barrows is dragged forcefully out of Mr. Fitweiler's office, he tells Martin:

"You may not know, Martin, but Mrs. Barrows had planned a reorganization of your department--subject to my approval, of course, subject to my approval. This brought you, rather than anyone else, to her mind--but again that is a phenomenon for Dr. Fitch and not for us."

Mr. Martin gets rid of Mrs. Barrows by correctly assessing her weaknesses and then lying to her about his habits so that their boss, Mr. Fitweiler, doubts her sanity when she report on his supposed vices.

Throughout James Thurber’s story, Martin presents himself at work as a dull, orderly, person. When Mrs. Barrows joins the office, her radically different approach to management upsets him not only for his own sake but also because she causes so many other employees to leave, either by firing them or making their lives miserable. Once she begins interfering in his department, he becomes so incensed that he begins to have homicidal fantasies.

The apparent change in Martin’s personality shows that he also has an imaginative streak. Martin also reveals his ability both to scheme and to pivot when the intended scheme does not pan out. He goes to Mrs. Barrows’s apartment intending to kill her. While there, he realizes that he can nonviolently cause her to generate her own dismissal. The fact that he is known throughout the company as a dependable, dull, and monotonous person will work to his advantage. The more outrageous are his claims, such as using drugs, the more unlikely it will be that anyone believes he ever said those things. He also realizes that Mrs. Barrows cannot resist informing on him. This plan works perfectly. When she does pass on his comments to Fitweiler, he can only conclude that she is suffering a mental breakdown and fires her.