mortgage on their backs so long that it's taken all the spirit
out of them. You pay the mortgage when it's due and go down and make a
little celebration of it, to cheer them up. I'll carry that thousand as
long as you like."

Miss Rose Farrell, nigh to perishing of ennui in the lonely office of
the absentee steel construction agents, had been installed as
stenographer in Room 66 a year earlier. Miss Farrell had, it appeared,
served Bassett several terms as stenographer to one of the legislative
committees of which he was chairman.

"You needn't be afraid of my telling anything," she said in reply to
Dan's cautioning. "Those winters I worked at the State House I learned
enough to fill three penitentiaries with great and good men, but you
couldn't dig it out of me with a steam shovel. They were going to have
me up before an investigating committee once, but I had burned my
shorthand notes and couldn't remember a thing. Your little Irish Rose
knows a few things, Mr. Harwood. I was on to your office before the
'Advertiser' sprung that story and gave it away that Mr. Bassett had a
room here. I spotted the senator from Fraser coming up our pedestrian
elevator, and I know all those rubes that have been dropping up to see
him--struck 'em all in the legislature. He won't tear your collar if you
put me on the job. And if I do say it myself I'm about as speedy on the
machine as you find 'em. All your little Rose asks is the right to an
occasional Wednesday matinee when business droops like a sick oleander.
You needn't worry about me having callers. I'm a business woman, I am,
and I guess I know what's proper in a business office. If I don't
understand men, Mr. Harwood, no poor working girl does."

Bassett was pleased with Dan's choice of a stenographer. He turned over
to Rose the reading of the rural newspapers and sundry other routine
matters. There was no doubt of Miss Farrell's broad knowledge of the
world, or of her fidelity to duty. Harwood took early opportunity to
subdue somewhat the pungency of the essences with which she perfumed
herself, and she gave up gum-chewing meekly at his behest. She assumed
at once toward him that maternal attitude which is peculiar to office
girls endowed with psychological insight. He sought to improve the
character of fiction she kept at hand for leisure moments, and was
surprised by the aptness of her comments on the books she borrowed on
his advice from the Public Library. She was twenty-f