el.
Poised and self-confident the girl was in her attitude toward herself:
the natural consequence of early success and responsibility. But about
her writing she exhibited an almost morbid timidity lest it be thought
"vulgar" or "common" by the editor-in-chief; and once McGuire Ellis felt
called upon to warn Hal that he was "taking all the gimp out of the
'Kitty the Cutie' stuff by trying to sewing-circularize it." Of
literature the girl knew scarcely anything; but she had an eager
ambition for better standards, and one day asked Hal to advise her in
her reading.

Not without misgivings he tried her with Stevenson's "Virginibus
Puerisque" and was delighted with the swiftness and eagerness of her
appreciation. Then he introduced her by careful selection to the poets,
beginning with Tennyson, through Wordsworth, to Browning, and thence to
the golden-voiced singers of the sonnet, and all of it she drank in with
a wistful and wondering delight. Soon her visits came to be of almost
daily occurrence. She would dart in of an evening, to claim or return a
book, and sit perched on the corner of the big work-table, like a
little, flashing, friendly bird; always exquisitely neat, always vividly
pretty and vividly alive. Sometimes the talk wandered from the status of
instructor and instructed, and touched upon the progress of the
"Clarion," the view which Milly's little world took of it, possible ways
of making it more interesting to the women readers to whom the "Cutie"
column was supposed to cater particularly. More than once the more
personal note was touched, and the girl spoke of her coming to the
Certina factory, a raw slip of a country creature tied up in calico, and
of Dr. Surtaine's kindness and watchfulness over her.

"He wanted to do well by me because of the old man--my father, I mean,"
she caught herself up, blushing. "They knew each other when I was a
kid."

"Where?" asked Hal.

"Oh, out east of here," she answered evasively.

Again she said to him once, "What I like about the 'Clarion' is that
it's trying to do something for _folks_. That's all the religion I could
ever get into my head: that human beings are mostly worth treating
decently. That counts for more than all your laws and rules and church
regulations. I don't like rules much," she added, twinkling up at him.
"I always want to kick 'em over, just as I always want to break through
the police lines at a fire."

"But rules and police lines are necessa