ualid mess of this business. She whose heart would revolt because
Florrie's work was never done, was delighted to wait all hours on the
convenience of men who seemed to be the very incarnation of incalculable
change and caprice. And what was she? Nothing but a clerk, at a
commencing salary of fifteen shillings per week! Ah! but she was a
priestess! She had a vocation which was unsoiled by the economic excuse.
She was a pioneer. No young woman had ever done what she was doing. She
was the only girl in the Five Towns who knew shorthand. And in a
fortnight (they said) the paper was to come out!

III

At the large table which was laden with prodigious, heterogeneous masses
of paper and general litter, she bent over the proofs by Mr. Dayson's
side. He had one proof; she had a duplicate; the copy lay between them.
It was the rough galley of a circular to the burgesses that they were
correcting together. Reading and explaining aloud, he inscribed the
cabalistic signs of correction in the margin of his proof, and she
faithfully copied them in the margin of hers, for practice.

"l.c.," he intoned.

"What does that mean?"

"Lower case," he explained grandiosely, in the naive vanity of his
knowledge. "Small letter; not a capital."

"Thank you," she said, and, writing "l.c.," noted in her striving brain
that 'lower case' meant a small letter instead of a capital; but she
knew not why, and she did not ask; the reason did not trouble her.

"I think we'll put 'enlightened' there, before 'public' Ring it, will
you?"

"Ring it? Oh! I see!"

"Yes, put a ring round the word in the margin. That's to show it isn't
the intelligent compositor's mistake, you see!"

Then there was a familiar and masterful footstep on the stairs, and the
attention of both of them wavered.

IV

Arthur Dayson and his proof-correcting lost all interest and all
importance for Hilda as Mr. Cannon came into the room. The unconscious,
expressive gesture, scornful and abrupt, with which she neglected them
might have been terribly wounding to a young man more sensitive than
Dayson. But Dayson, in his self-sufficient, good-natured mediocrity, had
the hide of an alligator. He even judged her movement quite natural, for
he was a flunkey born. Hilda gazed at her master with anxiety as he
deposited his black walking-stick in the corner behind the door and
loosed his white muffler and large overcoat (which Dayson called an
'immensikoff.') She thought the ma