u?"

"No, but," with urgent eagerness, "I'd like--I'm quite fast in
stenography."

"Well, Mr. Babson, in the editorial department, wants to give some
dictation and you might try--"

Una was so excited that she called herself a silly little fool. She
seized her untouched note-book, her pencils sharpened like lances, and
tried to appear a very mouse of modesty as she marched down the office
to take her first real dictation, to begin her triumphant career.... And
to have Walter Babson, the beloved fool, speak to her.

It was a cold shock to have to stand waiting behind Babson while he
rummaged in his roll-top desk and apparently tried to pull out his hair.
He looked back at her and blurted, "Oh! You, Miss Golden? They said
you'd take some dictation. Chase those blue-prints off that chair and
sit down. Be ready in a sec."

While she sat on the edge of the chair Babson yanked out drawers,
plunged his wriggling hands into folders, thrashed through a pile of
papers and letters that over-flowed a wire basket, and even hauled a
dictionary down from the top of the desk and hopefully peered inside the
front cover. All the time he kept up comment at which Una smiled
doubtfully, not quite sure whether it was meant for her or not:

"Now what the doggone doggonishness did I ever do with those doggone
notes, anyway? I ask you, in the-- Here they-- Nope--"

At last he found inside a book on motor fuels the wad of copy-paper on
which he had scrawled notes with a broad, soft pencil, and he began to
dictate a short article on air-cooling. Una was terrified lest she be
unable to keep up, but she had read recent numbers of the _Gazette_
thoroughly, she had practised the symbols for motor technologies, and
she was not troubled by being watched. Indeed, Babson seemed to have
enough to do in keeping his restless spirit from performing the
dismaying feat of leaping straight out of his body. He leaned back in
his revolving desk-chair with a complaining squawk from the spring, he
closed his eyes, put his fingers together piously, then seized the
chair-arms and held them, while he cocked one eye open and squinted at a
large alarm-clock on the desk. He sighed profoundly, bent forward, gazed
at his ankle, and reached forward to scratch it. All this time he was
dictating, now rapidly, now gurgling and grunting while he paused to
find a word.

"Don't be so _nervous_!" Una wanted to scream at him, and she wanted to
add, "You didn't ask my perm