eanor had been very
discreet about the first baby).

So now we arrive at the day when Molly left her desk in the ante-room
of Slater's, walked through the book department and the art offices and
encountered Miss Spinner, the little dried and spectacled reader of
forty-odd years, and centuries (or their equivalent) of magazine
experience.

"Miss Spinner," said Molly, "do you mind telling me what they pay you a
week?"

"Twenty-five," Miss Spinner replied promptly. "Not at all. Of course
I'd been fifteen years at Franklin Square, and it was all that
experience that made them offer me the three dollars raise. So I left.
But, of course, there are five magazines now where there used to be
one. In ten years I think there'll be ten. So does Mr. Slater. That
means competition, and that means that experience will always be worth
something to the new ones. You started at fifteen, you see, and of
course I only got ten ... Gracious, isn't that Mrs. Julia Carter
Sykes's voice? Perhaps you'd better step out, my dear--Mr. Slater's
talking with that English prison man and said that he wasn't to be
disturbed if the Twelve Apostles came!"

Molly went with her swift, unhasty step (she had long legs) and
received Mrs. Julia Carter Sykes urbanely, as befitted the best paid
woman novelist of her country. Occasionally she had the fancy to "trot
around to the office" as she called it: it was believed that she
"picked up types" there. And Molly knew how to keep her waiting
without offending her, just as she knew how to dispose of the
illustrators, from the Great Moguls who came in cabs to scold about the
defects in half-tone processes, to the just discovered young genius who
waited an hour in the outside hall, his great pasteboard square between
his knees.

"You're much too pretty to be here, my child--do you like it?" Mrs.
Julia Carter Sykes remarked impertinently (she was supposed to believe
that her manner was that of the English Aristocracy, and asked the most
embarrassing questions of everybody with an income of less than fifteen
thousand a year).

"Not very much," Molly replied placidly. "It's a little dull. I'm
thinking of going into journalism. Couldn't you give me some letters
to some of the editors? I could do good special article stuff, I'm
sure."

"But certainly!" the novelist cried. "You are too delicious! I'll
write you a card to Hecht himself this moment--I'm dining with him
to-night--and I'll speak of