o the
magazines pretty soon----"

"Then?"

"Then," said Mary Louise, with a quaver in her voice, "I'll have to go
back and teach thirty-seven young devils that six times five is thirty,
put down the naught and carry six, and that the French are a gay people,
fond of dancing and light wines. But I'll scrimp on everything from
hairpins to shoes, and back again, including pretty collars, and gloves,
and hats, until I've saved up another five hundred, and then I'll try it
all over again, because I--can--write."

From the depths of one capacious pocket the inquiring man took a small
black pipe, from another a bag of tobacco, from another a match. The
long, deft fingers made a brief task of it.

"I didn't ask you," he said, after the first puff, "because I could see
that you weren't the fool kind that objects." Then, with amazing
suddenness, "Know any of the editors?"

"Know them!" cried Mary Louise. "Know them! If camping on their
doorsteps, and haunting the office buildings, and cajoling, and fighting
with secretaries and office boys, and assistants and things constitutes
knowing them, then we're chums."

"What makes you think you can write?" sneered the thin man.

Mary Louise gathered up her brush, and comb, and towel, and parsley, and
jumped off the soap box. She pointed belligerently at her tormentor with
the hand that held the brush.

"Being the scrub-lady's stalwart son, you wouldn't understand. But I can
write. I sha'n't go under. I'm going to make this town count me in as
the four million and oneth. Sometimes I get so tired of being nobody at
all, with not even enough cleverness in me to wrest a living from this
big city, that I long to stand out at the edge of the curbing, and take
off my hat, and wave it, and shout, 'Say, you four million uncaring
people, I'm Mary Louise Moss, from Escanaba, Michigan, and I like your
town, and I want to stay here. Won't you please pay some slight
attention to me. No one knows I'm here except myself, and the rent
collector.'"

"And I," put in the rude young man.

"O, you," sneered Mary Louise, equally rude, "you don't count."

The collarless young man in the shabby slippers smiled a curious little
twisted smile. "You never can tell," he grinned, "I might." Then, quite
suddenly, he stood up, knocked the ash out of his pipe, and came over to
Mary Louise, who was preparing to descend the steep little flight of
stairs.

"Look here, Mary Louise Moss, from Es