s offices at Hanbridge covered
the entire district. The original title had been _The Turnhill Guardian
and Five Towns General Chronicle,_ and she had approved it; but when Mr.
Cannon, with a view to the intended development, had inverted the title
to _The Five Towns Chronicle and Turnhill Guardian_, she had
enthusiastically applauded his deep wisdom. Also she had applauded his
project of moving, later on, to Hanbridge, the natural centre of the
Five Towns. This was nearly the limit of her knowledge. She neither knew
nor cared anything about the resources or the politics or the programme
or the prospects of the paper. To her all newspapers were much alike.
She did not even explore, in meditation, the extraordinary psychology of
Mr. Cannon--the man whose original energy and restless love of
initiative was leading him to found a newspaper on the top of a
successful but audaciously irregular practice as a lawyer. She
incuriously and with religious admiration accepted Mr. Cannon as she
accepted the idea of the paper. And being, of course, entirely ignorant
of journalism, she was not in a position to criticize the organizing
arrangements of the newspaper. Not that these would have seemed
excessively peculiar to anybody familiar with the haphazard
improvisations of minor journalism in the provinces! She had indeed, in
her innocence, imagined that the basic fact of a newspaper enterprise
would be a printing-press; but when Mr. Dayson, who had been on _The
Signal_ and on sundry country papers in Shropshire, assured her that the
majority of weekly sheets were printed on jobbing presses in private
hands, she corrected her foolish notion.

Her sole interest--but it was tremendous!--lay in what she herself had
to do--namely, take down from dictation, transcribe, copy, classify, and
keep letters and documents, and occasionally correct proofs. All beyond
this was misty for her, and she never adjusted her sight in order to
pierce the mist.

Save for her desire to perfect herself in her duties, she had no desire.
She was content. In the dismal, dirty, untidy, untidiable, uncomfortable
office, arctic near the windows, and tropic near the stove, with dust on
her dress and ink on her fingers and the fumes of gas in her quivering
nostrils, and her mind strained and racked by an exaggerated sense of
her responsibilities, she was in heaven! She who so vehemently objected
to the squalid mess of the business of domesticity, revelled in the
sq