my room,
where I had left the door open and the gas burning. She gave a swift
glance around the place, and her eyes manifested disapproval.

"I wonder how you can ever find anything on that desk," she reproved me,
as I searched in a bureau drawer. To my utter terror she began to put
some papers in order.

"Here's an unopened letter from _Paisley's Magazine_," she announced.

I pounced upon it and tore it open, to discover a check for eighty
dollars.

"Good!" I exclaimed. "I'd forgotten that story. It was called 'Cynthia's
Mule'; I wonder what possessed me to write about a mule? Don't know
anything about them."

"That's why it sold, most likely," said Frieda. "The public prefers
poetry to truth in its prose. What are you wasting time for, fooling in
that drawer?"

"I have it. It's a twenty-dollar bill," I told her. "I put it among my
socks so that I shouldn't spend it. Might be very handy, you know. She
might need something, and you could go out and buy it."

"Can you afford it, Dave?" she asked me.

"Of course, and you forget the check I've just received. Mrs. Milliken
will cash it for me at her butcher's. He's very obliging."

Just then we heard something. Frieda stuffed the bill in some part of
her ample bosom and ran away. I heard her knock at the door and go in.

There was nothing for me to do but to look at the nearly finished page
that was still in the embrace of my typewriter. For some silly reason my
gorge rose at the idea of the virtuous dog, but I remembered, as I was
about to pull out and lacerate the paper, that my mind sometimes plays
me scurvy tricks. When I am interrupted in the beginning of a story, and
look over it again, it always seems deplorably bad. Another day I will
look at it more indulgently. Moreover, what was the use of thinking
about such trivialities when the world's great problem was unfolding
itself, just seven steps away over the worn strip of Brussels on the
landing.

So I settled down in my old Morris chair to ponder over the matter of
babies coming to the just and the unjust, provided with silver spoons or
lucky to be wrapped up in an ancient flannel petticoat. The most
beautiful gift of a kindly Nature or its sorriest practical joke,
welcome or otherwise, the arriving infant is entitled to respect and
commiseration. I wondered what might be the fate of this one. In a few
hours it will be frowned down upon by Mrs. Milliken, who will consider
it as an insult to the genus