A GLIMPSE OF PROMISED LAND

"Hello, Grace!"

I was passing the society editor in her den a moment later, and she called out a cheery greeting, although she didn't look up from her task. She was polishing her finger-nails as busily as if she lived for her hands—not by them.

"Hello, Jane!"

My very voice was out of alignment, however, as I spoke.

"Are you going to let all the world see that you're not a headstrong woman?" something inside my pride asked angrily, but as if for corroboration of my conscientious whisperings, I looked in a shamefaced way at the lines of my palm.—The head-line was weak and isolated—while 27 the heart-line was as crisscrossed as a centipede track!

27

But a heart-line has nothing at all to do with a city editor's desk—certainly not on a day when the crumpled balls of copy paper lying about his waste-basket look as if a woman had thrown them! Every one had missed its mark, and up and down the length of the room the typewriters were clicking falsetto notes. The files of papers on the table were in as much confusion as patterns for heathen petticoats at a missionary meeting.

"What's up?"

I had made my way to the desk of the sporting editor, who writes poetry and pretends he's so aerial that he never knows what day of the week it is, but when you pin him down he can tell you exactly what you want to know—from the color of the bride's going-away gown to the amount the bridegroom borrowed on his life insurance policy.

"Search me!" he answered—as usual. 28

28

"But there's something going on in this office!" I insisted. "Everybody looks as exercised as if the baby'd just swallowed a moth-ball."

"Huh?"

He looked around—then opened his eyes wider. "Oh, I believe I did hear 'em say—"

"What?"

 Prev. P 14/151 next