“I am at least willing to let you take charge of their vanity.”

“Oh, am I so good a keeper of vanity?”

“No, you are so gentle an exterminator of it.”

“Thank you,” she said, laughing.  Her hair seemed ready to break from its fastenings, and she gave it those deft touches of security which are mysterious to man, but which a little girl practices on a doll.

“You have wonderful hair,” he said.

And she answered:  “I’m going to cut it off.”

This is woman’s almost invariable reply to such a compliment.  Henry knew that she would say it, and she knew that she would not cut it off, and they both laughed.

“How did you happen to get into newspaper work?” he asked.

Her face became serious.  “I had to do something,” she answered, “and I couldn’t do anything else.  My mother was an invalid for ten years, and I nursed her, read to her day and night.  Sometimes in the winter she couldn’t sleep, and I would get up and amuse her by writing reviews of the books I had read.  It was only play, but after she was dead I thought that I might make it earnest.”

“And your father died when you were very young, I suppose.”

She looked away, and with both hands she began to touch her hair again.  “Yes,” she said.

“Tell me about him.”

“Why about him?”

“I don’t know.  Because you have told me about your mother, I suppose.”

“And are you so much interested in me?” she asked, looking earnestly at him.

“Yes.”

“I ought not to tell you, but I will.  We lived in the country.  My father was”—­She looked about her and then at him.  “My father was a drunkard, but my mother loved him devotedly.  One day he went to the village, several miles away, and at evening he didn’t come home, and my mother knew the cause.  It was a cold, snowy night.  Mother stood at the gate, holding a lantern.  She wouldn’t let me stand there with her, it was so cold, but I was on my knees in a chair at the window, and I could see her.  She stood there so long, and it seemed so cruel that I should be in a warm room while she was out in the cold, that I slipped out and closed the door softly after me.  I stood a short distance behind her, and I had not been standing there long when a horse, covered with snow, came stumbling out of the darkness.  Mother called me, and I ran to her.  We went down the road, holding the lantern first one side, then the other, that we might see into the corners of the fences.  We found him lying dead in the road, covered with snow.  Mother was never well after that night—­but really I am neglecting my work.”

He returned to his desk.  The proof-sheets of a leading article were brought to him, but he sat gazing at naught that he could see.

“Are you done with those proofs?” some one asked.

“Take them away,” he said, without looking up.  He sat for a long time, musing, and then he shook himself, a habit which he had lately formed in trying to free himself from meditations that sought to possess him.