ails. Sheila surveys him with pride and then
takes the wail up in a minor key. Their teamwork is marvelous. I fly
to the cooky jar and extract two round and sugary confections. I thrust
them into the pink, eager palms. The wails cease. Solemnly they place
one cooky atop the other, measuring the circlets with grave eyes.

"Mine's a weeny bit bigger'n yours this time," decides Sheila, and holds
her cooky heroically while Hans takes a just and lawful bite out of his
sister's larger share.

"The blessed little angels!" I say to myself, melting. "The dear,
unselfish little sweeties!" and give each of them another cooky.

Back to my typewriter. But the words flatly refuse to come now. I make
six false starts, bite all my best finger-nails, screw my hair into a
wilderness of cork-screws and give it up. No doubt a real Lady Writer
could write on, unruffled and unhearing, while the iceman squashed the
cucumbers, and the roast burned to a frazzle, and the Spalpeens perished
of hunger. Possessed of the real spark of genius, trivialities like
milkmen and cucumbers could not dim its glow. Perhaps all successful
Lady Writers with real live sparks have cooks and scullery maids, and
need not worry about basting, and gravy, and milkmen.

This book writing is all very well for those who have a large faith in
the future and an equally large bank account. But my future will have to
be hand-carved, and my bank account has always been an all too small pay
envelope at the end of each week. It will be months before the book
is shaped and finished. And my pocketbook is empty. Last week Max sent
money for the care of Peter. He and Norah think that I do not know.

Von Gerhard was here in August. I told him that all my firm resolutions
to forsake newspaperdom forever were slipping away, one by one.

"I have heard of the fascination of the newspaper office," he said, in
his understanding way. "I believe you have a heimweh for it, not?"

"Heimweh! That's the word," I had agreed. "After you have been a
newspaper writer for seven years--and loved it--you will be a newspaper
writer, at heart and by instinct at least, until you die. There's no
getting away from it. It's in the blood. Newspaper men have been known
to inherit fortunes, to enter politics, to write books and become
famous, to degenerate into press agents and become infamous, to blossom
into personages, to sink into nonentities, but their news-nose remained
a part of them, and the inky