only seventeen, much of the foreman's time was spent chasing dirty-faced
little boys away from her case, and if some boy didn't have his elbow in
her quad box, she was off her stool visiting either with some other
girl, or standing by the stove drying her hands--she was eternally
drying her hands--and talking to one of the men. In all the year and a
half that she was in the office the Princess never learned how to help
herself. When she had to dump her type, she had to call some man from
his work to help her--and then there would be more conversation.

But we kept her and were patient with her on account of her father, John
Swaney, a hard-working man who was trying to make something of the
Princess, so we put up with her perfumery and her powder rags and her
royal airs, and did all we could to teach her the difference between a
comma and a period--though she never really learned; and we were still
patient with her, even when she deliberately pied a lot of type after
being corrected for some piece of carelessness or worse. We made due
allowances for the Rutherford temper, which her father warned us not to
arouse. Nevertheless, her mother came to the office one winter day in
her black straw hat with a veil around it, and with the coat she had
worn for ten years, to tell us that she was afraid working in the shop
would hurt her daughter's social standing. So the Princess walked out
that night in a gust of musk--in her picture hat and sweeping cloak,
with bangles tinkling and petticoat swishing--and the office knew her no
more forever.

About the time that the Princess left the office to improve her social
standing, Eli Martin and his big mule team came to town from the Bethel
neighbourhood. He was as likely a looking red-headed country boy as you
ever saw. We were laying the town waterworks pipes that year, and Eli
and his team had work all summer. On the street he towered above the
other men several inches in height, and he looked big and muscular and
masculine in his striped undershirt and blue overalls, as he worked with
his team in the hot sun. Of course, the Princess would not have seen him
in those days. Her nose was seeking a higher social level, and the
clerks in the White Front dry-goods store formed the pinnacle of her
social ideal. But Eli Martin was naturally what in our parlance we call
a ladies' man, and he was not long in learning that the wide-brimmed
black hat, the ready-made faded green suit and the red