have the feel of it, if
you know what I mean."

And Letty knew and nodded. "I wonder what he is like?" she asked softly.

"I'll make it my business to find out," Edna assured her; "and I'll let
you know inside forty-eight hours."

Letty clapped her hands. "Good! That's the newspaper spirit! Make it
twenty-four hours and you are perfect!"

* * *

"--and I am very sorry to trouble you," she concluded the statement of
her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist.

"Not at all," he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. "If you
don't do your own talking, who's to do it for you? Now I understand your
predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want
to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first
place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a
line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or
fall by your own ability. There's Senator Longbridge, for instance,
and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney--" He
paused, with voice suspended.

"I am sure I know none of them," she answered despondently.

"It's not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one
that knows any one else that knows them?"

Edna shook her head.

"Then we must think of something else," he went on, cheerfully. "You'll
have to do something yourself. Let me see."

He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled
forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue
eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened.

"I have it! But no, wait a minute."

And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did,
till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze.

"You'll do, I think, though it remains to be seen," he said
enigmatically. "It will show the stuff that's in you, besides, and it
will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines
from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to
do Amateur Night at the Loops."

"I--I hardly understand," Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no
meaning to her. "What are the 'Loops'? and what is 'Amateur Night'?"

"I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better,
if you've only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression,
and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid.
The Lo