day, indeed, to
forward such of O'Mally's letters as she thought best, to attend to
his club notices and tradesmen's bills, and to taste the sense of
her high connections. The great men of the staff were all about her,
as contemplative as Buddhas in their private offices, each
meditating upon the particular trust or form of vice confided to his
care. Thus surrounded, Ardessa had a pleasant sense of being at the
heart of things. It was like a mental massage, exercise without
exertion. She read and she embroidered. Her room was pleasant, and
she liked to be seen at ladylike tasks and to feel herself a
graceful contrast to the crude girls in the advertising and
circulation departments across the hall. The younger stenographers,
who had to get through with the enormous office correspondence, and
who rushed about from one editor to another with wire baskets full
of letters, made faces as they passed Ardessa's door and saw her
cool and cloistered, daintily plying her needle. But no matter how
hard the other stenographers were driven, no one, not even one of
the five oracles of the staff, dared dictate so much as a letter to
Ardessa. Like a sultan's bride, she was inviolate in her lord's
absence; she had to be kept for him.

Naturally the other young women employed in "The Outcry" offices
disliked Miss Devine. They were all competent girls, trained in the
exacting methods of modern business, and they had to make good every
day in the week, had to get through with a great deal of work or
lose their position. O'Mally's private secretary was a mystery to
them. Her exemptions and privileges, her patronizing remarks, formed
an exhaustless subject of conversation at the lunch-hour. Ardessa
had, indeed, as they knew she must have, a kind of "purchase" on her
employer.

When O'Mally first came to New York to break into publicity, he
engaged Miss Devine upon the recommendation of the editor whose
ailing publication he bought and rechristened. That editor was a
conservative, scholarly gentleman of the old school, who was
retiring because he felt out of place in the world of brighter,
breezier magazines that had been flowering since the new century
came in. He believed that in this vehement world young O'Mally would
make himself heard and that Miss Devine's training in an editorial
office would be of use to him.

When O'Mally first sat down at a desk to be an editor, all the cards
that were brought in looked pretty much alike to him