“‘No, I haven’t, but you get me started, and I’ll keep going all right.’

“The next morning he asked how long it took me to get to the office from Prairie, and I said: 

“‘I moved last night, I have a room down on Diversey Boulevard now.’

“He looked me over thoughtfully.  Then he said:  ’You ought to be a poet.’

“‘Why?  I haven’t any 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 experience in my business.

“At the boarding-house I do have a little excitement now and then.  The second night after my installation a man walked into my room without knocking,—­that is, he opened the door.