_Ardessa_

The grand-mannered old man who sat at a desk in the reception-room
of "The Outcry" offices to receive visitors and incidentally to keep
the time-book of the employees, looked up as Miss Devine entered at
ten minutes past ten and condescendingly wished him good morning. He
bowed profoundly as she minced past his desk, and with an
indifferent air took her course down the corridor that led to the
editorial offices. Mechanically he opened the flat, black book at
his elbow and placed his finger on D, running his eye along the line
of figures after the name Devine. "It's banker's hours she keeps,
indeed," he muttered. What was the use of entering so capricious a
record? Nevertheless, with his usual preliminary flourish he wrote
10:10 under this, the fourth day of May.

The employee who kept banker's hours rustled on down the corridor to
her private room, hung up her lavender jacket and her trim spring
hat, and readjusted her side combs by the mirror inside her closet
door. Glancing at her desk, she rang for an office boy, and reproved
him because he had not dusted more carefully and because there were
lumps in her paste. When he disappeared with the paste-jar, she sat
down to decide which of her employer's letters he should see and
which he should not.

Ardessa was not young and she was certainly not handsome. The
coquettish angle at which she carried her head was a mannerism
surviving from a time when it was more becoming. She shuddered at
the cold candor of the new business woman, and was insinuatingly
feminine.

Ardessa's employer, like young Lochinvar, had come out of the West,
and he had done a great many contradictory things before he became
proprietor and editor of "The Outcry." Before he decided to go to
New York and make the East take notice of him, O'Mally had acquired
a punctual, reliable silver-mine in South Dakota. This silent friend
in the background made his journalistic success comparatively easy.
He had figured out, when he was a rich nobody in Nevada, that the
quickest way to cut into the known world was through the
printing-press. He arrived in New York, bought a highly respectable
publication, and turned it into a red-hot magazine of protest, which
he called "The Outcry." He knew what the West wanted, and it proved
to be what everybody secretly wanted. In six years he had done the
thing that had hitherto seemed impossible: built up a national
weekly, out on the news-stands the same