"What will you sign yourself?" he asked.

"My own name, I think," she said. "Joan Allway."

Miss Greyson suggested her coming home to dinner with them; but Joan
found an excuse. She wanted to be alone.




CHAPTER V


The twilight was fading as she left the office. She turned northward,
choosing a broad, ill-lighted road. It did not matter which way she
took. She wanted to think; or, rather, to dream.

It would all fall out as she had intended. She would commence by
becoming a power in journalism. She was reconciled now to the photograph
idea--was even keen on it herself. She would be taken full face so that
she would be looking straight into the eyes of her readers as she talked
to them. It would compel her to be herself; just a hopeful, loving
woman: a little better educated than the majority, having had greater
opportunity: a little further seeing, maybe, having had more leisure for
thought: but otherwise, no whit superior to any other young, eager woman
of the people. This absurd journalistic pose of omniscience, of
infallibility--this non-existent garment of supreme wisdom that, like the
King's clothes in the fairy story, was donned to hide his nakedness by
every strutting nonentity of Fleet Street! She would have no use for it.
It should be a friend, a comrade, a fellow-servant of the great Master,