Thus had another ideal tumbled to the rubbish heap! She seemed to be
breathing the dust which the newly fallen had stirred up among its
longer dead fellows. Certainly she was breathing the dust from
somewhere.

During her senior year at the university, when people would ask:
"And what are you going to do when you leave school, Miss Willard?"
she would respond with anything that came to hand, secretly hugging
to her mind that idea of getting a position in a publishing house. Her
conception of her publishing house was finished about the same time
as her class-day gown. She was to have a roll-top desk--probably of
mahogany--and a big chair which whirled round like that in the office
of the under-graduate dean. She was to have a little office all by
herself, opening on a bigger office--the little one marked "Private."
There were to be beautiful rugs--the general effect not unlike the
library at the University Club--books and pictures and cultivated
gentlemen who spoke often of Greek tragedies and the Renaissance.
She was a little uncertain as to her duties, but had a general idea
about getting down between nine and ten, reading the morning paper,
cutting the latest magazine, and then "writing something."

Commencement was now four months past, and one of her professors had
indeed secured for her a position in a Chicago "publishing house."
This was her first morning and she was standing at the window
looking down into Dearborn Street while the man who was to have her
in charge was fixing a place for her to sit.

That the publishing house should be on Dearborn Street had been her
first blow, for she had long located her publishing house on that
beautiful stretch of Michigan Avenue which overlooked the lake. But