There was absolute finality in her voice. Without a word the young man turned from her and sat staring at the river lights before us. Miss Morris pressed my hand.

"I'm going to take you home with me," she announced. She took out her watch and looked at it. "Quarter to three," she murmured. "What a night!" And after a moment she added under her breath, "And what an escape!"

She threw back her shoulders with a gesture as energetic as if at the same time she had cast off some intolerable burden. Then she added, in her cool, cynical fashion, "It's only fair, you know, that after such a vigil your drooping spirit should be refreshed by the rain of my mother's grateful tears—not to speak of Godfrey's!"

VIII
MARIA ANNUNCIATA

It had been a trying day in the Searchlight office. Godfrey Morris, our assistant feature editor, was ill, and much of his work had devolved on me. From ten o'clock in the morning I had steadily read copy and "built heads," realizing as my blue pencil raced over the sheets before me that my associates would resent the cutting of their stories and that Colonel Cartwell would freely condemn the heads. It was a tradition in Park Row that no human being save himself had ever built a newspaper head which satisfied our editor-in-chief, and his nightly explosions of rage over those on the proofs that came to his desk jarred even the firm walls of the Searchlight building.

To-day I sympathized with Colonel Cartwell, for as I bent wearily over my desk, cutting, rewriting, adding to the pile of edited copy before me, a scare-head in a newspaper I had received that morning from my home city swung constantly before my tired eyes. It was plain that the ambitious Western editor had been taking lessons in head-building from the Searchlight itself, and was offering us the tribute of humble imitation; for, in the blackest type he could select, and stretching across two columns of the Sentinel's first page, were these startling lines:

From City Room to Convent Cell

Miss May Iverson, Daughter of General John Lamar Iverson of This City, to Take the Vows of a Nun of the Sacred Cross

The article which followed was illustrated with photographs of my father, of me, and of the convent from which I had graduated nearly four years ago. It sketched my career as a reporter on the New York Searchlight, mentioned my newspaper work and my various magazine stories with kindly approval, and stated that my intention when I graduated at eighteen had been to enter the convent at twenty-one, but that in deference to the wishes of my father I had consented to wait another year. This time of probation was almost over, the Sentinel added, and it was "now admitted" that Miss Iverson, "despite the brilliant promise of her journalistic career," would be one of the thirty novices who entered the convent of St. Catharine in July.

All this I had read only once before thrusting the Sentinel out of sight under the mass of copy on my desk. Now, word by word, it returned to me as I built the heads that were to startle our reading public in the morning. Around me the usual sounds of the city room swelled steadily into the familiar symphony of our work. Typewriters clicked and rattled, telephone bells kept up their insistent summons, the presses, now printing the final evening editions, sent from far below their deep and steady purr, while through it all the voices of Farrell and Hurd cut their incisive way, like steamboat whistles in a fog, to members of the staff. It was an hour I loved, even as I loved the corresponding hour at St. Catharine's, when students and nuns knelt together in the dim, beautiful convent chapel while the peace of benediction fell upon our souls. I wanted both the convent and my work. I could not have them both. And even now, toward the end of my fourth year of professional life, I was still uncertain which I was to choose. For months I had been hesitating, the helpless victim of changing moods, of conflicting desires. Now, I realized, there must be an end to these. The article in the Sentinel had brought matters to a focus. In one way or the other, and for all time, I must decide my problem.