u yet."

He nodded a contemptuous head in Jock's direction. "Carrying a packer?"

Emma McChesney wiped her fingers daintily on her napkin, crushed it on
the table, and leaned back in her chair. "Men," she observed,
wonderingly, "are the cussedest creatures. This chap occupied the same
room with you last night and you don't even know his name. Funny! If two
strange women had found themselves occupying the same room for a night
they wouldn't have got to the kimono and back hair stage before they
would not only have known each other's names, but they'd have tried on
each other's hats, swapped corset cover patterns, found mutual friends
living in Dayton, Ohio, taught each other a new Irish crochet stitch,
showed their family photographs, told how their married sister's little
girl nearly died with swollen glands, and divided off the mirror into
two sections to paste their newly-washed handkerchiefs on. Don't tell
_me_ men have a genius for friendship."

"Well, who is he?" insisted Ed Meyers. "He told me everything but his
name this morning. I wish I had throttled him with a bunch of Bisons'
badges last night."

"His name," smiled Emma McChesney, "is Jock McChesney. He's my one and
only son, and he's put through his first little business deal this
morning just to show his mother that he can be a help to his folks if he
wants to. Now, Ed Meyers, if you're going to have apoplexy, don't you go
and have it around this table. My boy is only on his second piece of
pie, and I won't have his appetite spoiled."

EDNA FERBER

A professor of literature once began a lecture on Lowell by saying: "It
makes a great deal of difference to an author whether he is born in
Cambridge or Kalamazoo." Miss Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, but it
hasn't made much difference to her. The date was August 15, 1887. She
attended high school at Appleton, Wisconsin, and at seventeen secured a
position as reporter on the Appleton _Daily Crescent_. That she was
successful in newspaper work is shown by the fact that she soon had a
similar position on the _Milwaukee Journal_, and went from there to the
staff of the _Chicago Tribune_, one of the leading newspapers in the
United States.

But journalism, engrossing as it is, did not take all of her time. She
began a novel, working on it in spare moments, but when it was finished
she was so dissatisfied with it that she threw the manuscript into the
waste basket. Here her mother found it, and sent it