y poetic ability that I know of.'

"'Probably not, but you can get along without that. What a poet needs
first of all is nerve.'

"I didn't think of anything apt to say in return so I got to work. Day
after day he tried me out on something new and watched me when he
thought I didn't notice, and went over my work very carefully. One
morning he asked me to write five hundred words on 'The First Job in a
Big City,' bringing out a country aspirant's sensations on the occasion
of his first interview with a prospective employer.

"I still felt so strongly about his insolent assurance that I couldn't
hold down his little old job, that I had no trouble at all with the
assignment. He read it slowly and made no comment, but he gave it a
place in the current issue. And then came a blessed day when he said,
'Well, you are on for good, Miss Starr. I now believe in the
scriptural injunction about seventy times seven, and a kind Providence
cut the margin down for me. I forgive Uncle Baker for the nineteen
atrocities at last.'

"I was very happy about it, for I do love the work and the others in
the office are splendid, so keen and clever, and Mr. Carver is really
wonderful. We are not a large concern, and we have to lend a hand
wherever hands are needed. So I am getting five times my fifteen
dollars a week in experience, and I am singing inside every minute I
feel so good about everything. The workers are all efficient and
enthusiastic, and we are great friends. We gossip affectionately about
whoever is absent, and hold a jubilee at the restaurant down-stairs
when any one gets ahead with an extra story. No other publishers have
come rapping at my door in a mad attempt to steal me away from Mr.
Carver. I have no bulky mail soliciting stories from my facile pen.
But I am making good with Mr. Carver, and that's the thing right now.

"Have I fallen in love yet? Carol, dear, I always understood that when
folks get married they lose their sentimentality. Are you the proving
exception? My acquaintance with Chicago masculinity is confined to the
office, the Methodist Church, and the boarding-house. The office force
is all married but the office boy. The Methodist congregation is
composed of women, callow youths and bald heads of families. Women are
counted out, of necessity. I am beyond callow youths, and not advanced
to heads of families. Why, I haven't a chance to fall in love,--worse
luck, too, for I need the expe