“Is that satisfactory?”
“Oh, YES!”
“Well, then,” he said, “I'll give you free rein. Just get your copy in by Wednesday night—we go to press Thursdays—and I promise to read every word of it myself.”
“Oh,” she said.
There were a thousand questions she'd have liked to ask, but Ed Martin, smiling a queer kind of smile, had turned to his papers as if anxious to get at them. No; she mustn't begin by bothering him with questions. He was a busy man, and he'd put this new, big responsibility on HER—“a free rein,” he had said. And she must live up to that trust; she must find her own way—study up the problem of society editing, which, even if not her ideal, yet was a wedge to who-knew-what? And meanwhile perhaps she could set a new standard for society columns—brilliant and clever...
Missy left the Beacon office, suffused with emotions no pen, not even her own, could ever have described.
Ed Martin, safely alone, allowed himself the luxury of an extensive grin. Then, even while he smiled, his eyes sobered.
“Poor young one.” He sighed and shook his head, then took up the editorial he was writing on the delinquencies of the local waterworks administration.
Meanwhile Missy, moving slowly back up Main Street, was walking on something much softer and springier than the board sidewalk under her feet.
She didn't notice even the cracks, now. The acquaintances who passed her, and the people sitting contentedly out on their shady porches, seemed in a different world from the one she was traversing.