throw open all the doors and windows and air the room. There was one I used to dream of when I was overworked, which was usually. He was always a snake in the dream—a fat, disgusting, lazy snake, slowly squirming over the ground near me, with his bulging green eyes on my face. There were times when I was afraid to go to sleep for fear of dreaming of that snake; and when during the day he came into the room and over to my desk I would hardly have been surprised to see him crawl instead of walk. Indeed, his walk was a kind of crawl.

28

Mr. Gibson, Hurd's star reporter, whose desk was next to mine, spoke to me about him one day, and his grin was not as wide as usual.

"Is Yawkins annoying you?" he asked. "I've seen you actually shudder when he came to your desk. If the cad had any sense he'd see it, too. Has he said anything? Done anything?"

I said he hadn't, exactly, but that I felt a strange feeling of horror every time he came near me; and Gibson raised his eyebrows and said he guessed he knew why, and that he would attend to it. He must have attended to it, for Yawkins stopped coming to my desk, and after a few months he was discharged for letting himself be "thrown down" on a big story, and I never saw him again. But at the time Mr. 29 Hurd gave me his Wall Street assignment I was beginning to be horribly afraid to approach strangers, which is no way for a reporter to feel; and when I had to meet strange men I always found myself wondering whether they would be the Hurd type or the Yawkins type. I hardly dared to hope they would be like Mr. Gibson, who was like the men at home—kind and casual and friendly; but of course some of them were.

29

Once Mrs. Hoppen, a woman reporter on the Searchlight, came and spoke to me about them. She was forty and slender and black-eyed, and her work was as clever as any man's, but it seemed to have made her very hard. She seemed to believe in no one. She made me feel as if she had dived so deep in life that she had come out into a place where there wasn't anything. She came to me one day when Yawkins was coiled over my desk. He crawled away as soon as he saw her, for he hated her. After he went she stood looking down at me and hesitating. It was not like her to hesitate about anything.

"Look here," she said at last; "I earn a good income by attending to my own business, and I usually let other people's business alone. Besides, I'm not cut out for a Star of Bethlehem. But I just want to 

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