It was always a good time for certain people, the editor reflected.  They talked for half an hour, irrelevant talk, Martie thought it, for it was principally of her personal history and his own.  Then a stenographer interrupted; the little boy was afraid that his mother had gone away through some other door!

The little boy came in, and shook hands with Mr. Trowbridge, and subsided into his mother’s lap.  Then the three had another half-hour’s talk.  Mr. Trowbridge had boys, too, but they were up in the country now.

He himself escorted them over the office, through large spaces filled with desks, past closed doors, through a lunch-room and a library.  Respectful greetings met them on all sides.  Martie was glad she had on her wedding suit, and the new hat that had been in a department store on Sixth Avenue yesterday afternoon.  Mr. Trowbridge called Mrs. Bannister’s attention to a certain desk.  When they went back to the privacy of his own office, he asked her if she would like to come to use that desk, say on Monday?

“There’s a bunch of confidential letters there now, for you to answer,” he said.  “Then there are always articles to change, or cut, or adapt.  Also our Miss Briggs, in the ‘My Own Money Club,’ needs help.  We may ask you sometimes to take home a bunch of stories to read; we may ask you to do something else!”

“I’ll address envelopes or stoke the furnace!” said Martie, bright tears in her smiling eyes.  “I don’t know whether I’m worth all that money,” she added, “for it doesn’t seem to me that anybody in the world really earns as much as twenty dollars a week, but I’ll try to be!  I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’ve been waiting all my life for this chance!”

“Well, even at that age, you may have a year or two of usefulness left, if your health is spared you.” the editor said.  They parted laughing, and Martie went out into the wonderful, sunny, hospitable city as gay as Teddy was.  Oh, how she would work, how she would work!  She would get down to the office first of all; she would wear the trimmest suits; she would never be cross, never be tired, never rebel at the most flagrant imposition!  She would take the cold baths and wear the winter underwear that kept tonsilitis at bay; she would hire a typewriter, and keep on with her articles.  If ever a woman in the world kept a position, then Martie would keep hers!

And, of course, women did.  There was that pretty, capable woman who came into Mr. Trowbridge’s office, and was introduced as the assistant editor.  Coolly dressed, dainty and calm, she had not suggested that the struggle was too hard.  She had smilingly greeted Martie, offered a low-voiced suggestion, and vanished unruffled and at peace.

“Why, that’s what this world is,” Martie reflected.  “Workers needing jobs, and jobs needing workers.”  And suddenly she hit upon the keynote to her new philosophy.  “Men don’t worry and fidget about keeping their jobs, and I’M not going to.  I’m just as necessary and just as capable as if I were—­say, Len.  If Len came on here for a job I wouldn’t worry myself sick about his ever getting it!”