“Don’t like it?” asked the librarian, disposing of an interruption with that casual ease that always fascinated Martie.  To see Miss Fanny seize four books from the hands that brought them into her range of vision, flip open the four covers with terrific speed, manipulate various paper slips and rubber stamps with energy and certainty, vigorously copy certain mysterious letters and numbers, toss the discarded books into a large basket at her elbow and then, for the first time, as she handed the selected books to the applicant, glance up with her smile and whispered “Good afternoon,” was a real study in efficiency.

“I don’t understand it,” Martie smiled.

“Did you read it?” persisted the older woman.

“Well—­not much.”  Martie had, in fact, hardly opened the book, an excellent collection of some twenty essays for girls under the general title “Choosing a Life Work.”

“Listen.  Why don’t you study the Cutter system, and familiarize yourself a little with this work, and come in here with me?” asked Miss Fanny, in her firm, pushing voice.

“When?” Martie asked, considering.

“Well—­I can’t say when.  I’m no oracle, my dear.  But some day the grave and reverend seigneurs on my Board may give me an assistant, I suppose.”

“Oh—­I know—­” Martie was vague again.  “What would I get?”

Miss Fanny’s harsh cheeks and jaw stiffened, her eyes half closed, as she bit her lip in thought.

“Fifteen, perhaps,” she submitted.

Martie dallied with the pleasing thought of having fifteen dollars of her own each month.

“But can’t Miss Fanny make you feel as if you were back in school?” she asked, when the girls were again in Main Street.  “I’d just as lieves be in the lib’ary as anywheres,” she added.

“I drather be in the box factory,” Grace said.  “More money.”

“More work, too!” Martie suggested.  “Come on, let’s go to Bonestell’s!”

Other persons of all ages were in the drug store, seated on stools at the high marble counter, or at the little square cherry tables in the dim room at the rear.  Drugs were a lesser consideration than brushes, stationery, cameras, candy, cigars, post cards, gum, mirrors, celluloid bureau sets, flower seeds, and rubber toys and rattles, but large glass flagons of coloured waters duly held the corners of the show windows on the street, and dusty and fly-specked cards advertising patent medicines overlapped each other.

The three girls nodded to various acquaintances, and, as they slid on to seats at the counter, greeted the soda clerk familiarly.  This was Reddy Johnson, a lean, red-headed youth in a rather dirty white jacket buttoned up to the chin.  Reddy was assisted by a blear-eyed little Swedish girl of about sixteen, who rushed about blindly with her little blonde head hanging.  He himself did not leave the counter, which he constantly mopped with a damp, mud-coloured