unpretentious thing, that column, and yet so full of
insight, and sagacity, and whimsical humor. Not a guffaw in
it, but a smile in every fifth line. She wondered if those
years of illness, and loneliness, with weeks of reading, and
tramping, and climbing in the Colorado mountains had kept
him strangely young, or made him strangely old.

She welcomed the hours that lay between New York and
Chicago. They would give her an opportunity to digest the
events of the past ten days. In her systematic mind she
began to range them in the order of their importance. Horn
& Udell came first, of course, and then the line of
maternity dresses she had selected to take the place of the
hideous models carried under Slosson's regime. And then the
slip-over pinafores. But somehow her thoughts became
jumbled here, so that faces instead of garments filled her
mind's eye. Again and again there swam into her ken the
face of that woman of fifty, in decent widow's weeds, who
had stood there in the Night Court, charged with
drunkenness on the streets. And the man with the frost-
bitten fingers in Madison Square. And the dog in the
sweater. And the feverish concentration of the piece-work
sewers in the window of the loft building.

She gave it up, selected a magazine, and decided to go in to
lunch.

There was nothing spectacular about the welcome she got on
her return to the office after this first trip. A firm that
counts its employees by the thousands, and its profits in