because----"

Tony's gift for remembering faces and facts amounts to genius.

With two deft movements he whisked two papers from among the many in the
rack, and held them out.

"Kewaskum Courier?" he suggested.

"Nix," said Mercedes Meron, "I'll take a Chicago Scream."

"London Times?" said Tony.

"No," replied Guy Peel. "Give me the San Antonio Express."

X

THE HOMELY HEROINE

Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions, beckoned me with her
finger. I had been standing at Kate O'Malley's counter, pretending to
admire her new basket-weave suitings, but in reality reveling in her
droll account of how, in the train coming up from Chicago, Mrs. Judge
Porterfield had worn the negro porter's coat over her chilly shoulders in
mistake for her husband's. Kate O'Malley can tell a funny story in a way
to make the after-dinner pleasantries of a Washington diplomat sound like
the clumsy jests told around the village grocery stove.

"I wanted to tell you that I read that last story of yours," said Millie,
sociably, when I had strolled over to her counter, "and I liked it, all
but the heroine. She had an 'adorable throat' and hair that 'waved away
from her white brow,' and eyes that 'now were blue and now gray.' Say,
why don't you write a story about an ugly girl?"

"My land!" protested I. "It's bad enough trying to make them accept my
stories as it is. That last heroine was a raving beauty, but she came
back eleven times before the editor of Blakely's succumbed to her charms."

Millie's fingers were busy straightening the contents of a tray of combs
and imitation jet barrettes. Millie's fingers were not intended for that
task. They are slender, tapering fingers, pink-tipped and sensitive.

"I should think," mused she, rubbing a cloudy piece of jet with a bit of
soft cloth, "that they'd welcome a homely one with relief. These
goddesses are so cloying."

Millie Whitcomb's black hair is touched with soft mists of gray, and she
wears lavender shirtwaists and white stocks edged with lavender. There
is a Colonial air about her that has nothing to do with celluloid combs
and imitation jet barrettes. It breathes of dim old rooms, rich with the
tones of mahogany and old brass, and Millie in the midst of it,
gray-gowned, a soft white fichu crossed upon her breast.

In our town the clerks are not the pert and gum-chewing young persons
that story-writers are wont to describe. The girls at Bascom's are
i