asped weakly.

"Well, I did!" Ellen repeated. "I just says to him, 'Since you're so
mighty particular, Mr. Harrison, I don't see why you don't do your own
typing!'" Ellen stood up and, indicating an imaginary Mr. Harrison,
showed her family the pose she had taken.

"Well," asked Terry, "what did he say?"

"What did he say? He flew off the handle and shouted out: 'There's one
thing sure: I'll never have you type another letter!' Just that way, as
if I was nothing but an old errand boy! And after I had just done over
his old letter for him six times, too!" Aggrieved and injured, Ellen
appealed to her father: "Say, Dad, what do you know about that?"

Jamie O'Brien slowly cleared his throat. "Is that the way they teach you
at the Business College to talk to your employer?"

The reproof in Jamie's words was entirely lost upon Ellen. She tossed
her head scornfully. "Oh, us girls are on to his kind all right! We give
it to them straight from the shoulder! That's the only way to treat
'em--the fussy old women! Then they respect you!"

"Ellen, Ellen, Ellen," Mrs. O'Brien wailed forlornly, "what makes you
talk that way?"

Terence drew Ellen back to her story: "Well, Sis, after that, what did
you say and what did he say?"

Ellen's ill humour was fast disappearing. Under the magic of her own
recital, she was beginning to see herself in a new and flattering light.
Instead of the inefficient stenographer who, a few moments before, had
sought to hide her discomfiture in a bluster of abuse, she was now a
poor deserving working-girl who had been put upon by an unscrupulous
employer. Conscious of her own worth and made courageous by that
consciousness, she had been able, it now seemed to her, to hold her own
in a manner which must excite the admiration of her family.

"Well, when he used such language to me, I saw all right what kind of a
man he was and I just gave it to him straight. 'I see what you're
after,' I says to him. 'You think you're going to bounce me before my
week's up and you think I'm so meek that I'll leave without saying a
word! But I just won't!' I says to him. 'You hired me for a week and if
you think you can throw me out without paying me a week's salary, you're
mighty mistaken! I've got a father,' I says to him, 'and he'll make it
hot for you!'"

Upon Mrs. O'Brien at least the effect of the story was almost
terrifying. "Ellen, Ellen," she wailed, "what makes you talk so? You
didn't really say that to the