you. I'll tell him to send you to
interview me at 'Bonnybraeside.'"

"Thanks," said Molly laconically and rose to show the celebrity to Mr.
Slater's sanctum. The English prison man, emerging, took in the
contrasted couple at a single glance, supposed them to be the whirlwind
editor's wife and daughter, from his greeting ("Come in, come in, my
dears, both of you!") and inquired of his wife, eight days later, how
she explained a woman of that type, "strung with sapphires, literally,"
and a daughter like a young duchess, with Irish eyes and a walk like
Diana's. His wife could not explain it at all, and said as much.

Molly left Mr. Slater somewhat puzzled. He raised her salary three
dollars, might have been pushed to five, but she merely smiled
deprecatingly.

"It isn't exactly that," she said, "but there seems no outlook,
somehow. I don't think it's a very reasonable profession--if it is a
profession."

He exploded into the name of a great English novelist who held
precisely that position.

"Yes. But I am not a great novelist, you see," said Molly, and cleared
out her desk with the swift thoroughness that characterized her. She
put a clean sheet of green blotting paper on it before she left, and
washed out the inkwell herself.

"That stenographer spells worse and worse, remember," she remarked.
"I'll look in for any mail."

"Why, aren't you going to stay at a hundred-and-three any more?"

Miss Pinner spoke with concern: she knew that the boarding-house
recommended highly by Eleanor's rector (his sister had stayed there
while studying singing) was very tautly managed, in an unobtrusive way,
and that the sisters who directed it had a shrewd idea of the goings
and comings of their "guests."

"No," said Molly. "I'll be out at all hours, maybe, and they wouldn't
like it. Don't be worried--I'll look in now and then."

And so, for a year, she did, and they were all delighted to see her,
for few people likely to enter such offices can talk more amusingly
than Molly Dickett. She had always used her material well, when it was
limited, and now, when it bumped into the Himalayas at one end (her
famous Rajah of Bhutpore interview) and rounded the hitherto
speechless promontories of Spud Connors' career, the champion
heavyweight of the world (she actually drew vivid metaphors from him
and he gave her a tintype of himself at eight years) the entire staff
gathered 'round her when she came, and Mr. Slater, under a