cotton mills and to think that they're threatening to take their doll-rags and move to Birmingham and leave us desolate!"

"Where the iron would be nearer?" I asked, and he fairly beamed.

"Sure! Say, if you know that much about the company's affairs, why don't you try for this assignment yourself?"

But I shook my head.

"I've got relatives in Alabama—that's how I 31 knew that iron grows on trees down there," I explained.

31

"Well—that's what the trouble is about! Oldburgh can't tell whether this fellow, Maitland Tait, is going to pack the 'whole blarsted thing, don't you know, into his portmanteau' and tote it off—or buy up more ground here and enlarge the plant so that the company's grandchildren will call this place home."

I turned away, feeling very indifferent. Oldburgh's problem was small compared with that letter in my hand-bag.

"And he won't tell?" I asked, crossing over to my own desk and fitting the key in a slipshod fashion.

"He seems to think that silence is the divine right of corporations. Nobody has been able to get a word out of him—nor even to see him."

"Then—they don't know whether he's a human being or a Cockney?"

He leaned across toward me, his elbow flattening two tiers of keys on his machine. 32

32

"Say, the society's column's having fever and ague, too," he whispered. "The tale records that two of our 'acknowledged leaders' met him in Pittsburgh last winter—and they're at daggers' points now for the privilege of killing the fatted calf for him.—The one that does it first is IT, of course, and Jane Lassiter's scared to death! The calf is fat and the knife is sharp—but no report of the killing has come in."

I laughed. It always makes me laugh when I think how hard some people work to get rid of their fatted calves, and how much harder others have to labor to acquire a veal cutlet.

"Of course he was born in a cabin?" I turned back to the poet and asked, after a little while devoted to my own work, in which I learned that my mind wouldn't concentrate sufficiently for me to embroider my story of an embryo 

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