trip, it was glacier-like. The sparkle and the color were
gone. She was frowning, and what little he could see of her eyes
was cold and steel-gray. Oh, he knew the symptoms, he did. He was an
observer, and he knew it, too, and some day, when he was big enough,
he was going to be a reporter, sure. And in the meantime he studied
the procession of life as it streamed up and down eighteen
sky-scraper floors in his elevator car. He slid the door open for her
sympathetically and watched her trip determinedly out into the street.

There was a robustness in her carriage which came of the soil rather
than of the city pavement. But it was a robustness in a finer than the
wonted sense, a vigorous daintiness, it might be called, which gave an
impression of virility with none of the womanly left out. It told of
a heredity of seekers and fighters, of people that worked stoutly with
head and hand, of ghosts that reached down out of the misty past and
moulded and made her to be a doer of things.

But she was a little angry, and a great deal hurt. "I can guess what you
would tell me," the editor had kindly but firmly interrupted her lengthy
preamble in the long-looked-forward-to interview just ended. "And you
have told me enough," he had gone on (heartlessly, she was sure, as
she went over the conversation in its freshness). "You have done no
newspaper work. You are undrilled, undisciplined, unhammered into shape.
You have received a high-school education, and possibly topped it off
with normal school or college. You have stood well in English. Your
friends have all told you how cleverly you write, and how beautifully,
and so forth and so forth. You think you can do newspaper work, and you
want me to put you on. Well, I am sorry, but there are no openings. If
you knew how crowded--"

"But if there are no openings," she had interrupted, in turn, "how did
those who are in, get in? How am I to show that I am eligible to get
in?"

"They made themselves indispensable," was the terse response. "Make
yourself indispensable."

"But how can I, if I do not get the chance?"

"Make your chance."

"But how?" she had insisted, at the same time privately deeming him a
most unreasonable man.

"How? That is your business, not mine," he said conclusively, rising
in token that the interview was at an end. "I must inform you, my dear
young lady, that there have been at least eighteen other aspiring young
ladies here this week, and that I have not