was realized first. The morning after she reached
home she visited Mr. Hailstorks and told him she would sublet her
mansion. Now that she wanted to collect rent from it instead of paying
rent for it her description of its advantages was inevitably altered.
With perfect sincerity she described its very faults as attractions.

Thereafter her life was made miserable by the calls of people who
wanted to look the place over. She had incessant offers, but she would
not surrender her nest till she was ready to go back to the shipyard,
and that was always to-morrow--the movable to-morrow which like the
horizon is always just beyond.

She sent herself to school and was dazed by her ignorance. In
arithmetic she had forgotten what she had gained at the age of ten,
and it was not easy to recapture it.

On the typewriter she had to learn the alphabet all over again in a
new order, and this was fiendishly hard. She studied the touch-system
with the keyboard covered, and her blunders were disheartening. Her
deft fingers seemed hardly to be her own. They would not obey her will
at all.

Shorthand was baffling. It took her five times as long to write in
shorthand as in longhand such thrilling literature as: "Dear
customer,--Letter received and contents noted. In reply to same would
say--"

At first she was a trifle snobbish and stand-offish with some of the
pert young fellow-pupils, but before long her opinion of them
increased to a respect verging on awe.

They could take dictation, chew gum, and fix their back hair with the
free hand all at once. Their fingers pattered the keyboard like rain,
and their letters were exquisitely neat. They had studied for a long
time, and had acquired proficiency. And it is no easy thing to acquire
proficiency in any task, from cobbling shoes to polishing sonnets or
moving armies.

Marie Louise was humiliated to find that she really did not know how
to spell some of the simplest words. When she wrote with running pen
she never stopped to spell. She just sketched the words and let them
go. She wrote, "I beleive I recieved," so that nobody could tell _e_
from _i_; and she put the dot where it might apply to either. Her
punctuation was all dashes.

The typewriter would not permit anything vague. A word stood out in
its stark reality, howling "Illiterate!" at her. Her punctuation
simply would not do.

Pert young misses who were honored by a wink from an
ice-cream-soda-counter keeper or by an i