ress Club, but she
discovered that she was the only real worker in the club and never
attended a second meeting. She told us that too many of the women wore
white stockings and low shoes, read their own unpublished short stories,
and regarded her wide-shouldered shirtwaist and melodramatic openwork
hosiery with suspicion and alarm.

As the years passed, and wedding after wedding sizzled under her pen,
she complained to us that she was beginning to be called "auntie" in too
many houses, and that the stock of available young men who didn't wear
their handkerchiefs under their collars at the dances had dwindled down
to three. This reality faces every girl who lives in a country town.
Then she is left with two alternatives: to go visiting or to begin
bringing them up by hand.

Miss Larrabee went visiting. At the end of a month she wrote: "It's all
over with me. He is a nice fellow, and has a job doing 'Live Topics
About Town' here on the _Sun_. Give my job to the little Wheatly girl,
and tell her to quit writing poetry, and hike up her dress in the back.
My adjectives are in the left-hand corner of the desk under 'When
Knighthood Was in Flower.' And do you suppose you could get me and the
grand keeper of the records and seals a pass home for Christmas if I'd
do you a New York letter some time?

"They say these city papers are hog tight!"

IV

"As a Breath into the Wind"

We are proud of the machinery in our office--the two linotypes, the big
perfecting press and the little jobbers. They are endowed by office
traditions with certain human attributes--having their moods and
vagaries and tantrums--so we love them as men love children. And this is
a queer thing about them: though our building is pocked with windows
that are open by day seven months in the year, and though the air of the
building is clean enough, save for the smell of the ink, yet at night,
after the machines have been idle for many hours and are probably
asleep, the place smells like the lair of wild animals. By day they are
as clean as machines may be kept. And even in the days when David Lewis
petted them and coddled them and gave them the core of his heart, they
were speckless, and bright as his big, brown, Welsh eyes, but the night
stinks of them were rank and beastly.

David came to us, a stray cat, fifteen years ago. He was too small to
wrestle with the forms--being cast in the nonpareil mould of his
race--and so we put him to carrying pa