“Please,” said the red-headed girl meekly.
“Sure you don’t want to trail along? That drug store really isn’t half bad.”
“I’m always afraid that something might happen to me and that I mightn’t get back,” explained the red-headed girl. “Like getting run over, or arrested or kidnapped or something. . . . One with lettuce in it, please.”
She sat contemplating the remaining occupants of the press seats about her with fascinated eyes. Evidently others were agitated by the same fears that haunted her. At any rate, three or four dozen were still clinging to their places, reading or writing or talking with impartial animation. They looked much nicer and less impersonal scattered about like that, but they still made her feel dreadfully shy and incompetent. They all knew one another so well; they were so casual and self-contained. Hurrying through the corridors, their ribald, salty banter broke over her in waves, leaving her drowned and forlorn.
She liked them awfully—that lanky, middle-aged man with the shrewd, sensitive face, jabbering away with the opulent-looking young creature in the sealskin cap and cloak; that Louisville reporter with her thin pretty face and little one-sided smile; that stocky youngster with the white teeth and the enormous vocabulary and the plaid necklace; that really beautiful girl who looked like an Italian opera singer and swore like a pirate, and arrived every day exactly an hour late in a flame-coloured blouse up to her chin and a little black helmet down to her eyebrows.
“Here’s your sandwich,” said the reporter—“two of ’em, just to show my heart’s in the right place. The poisonous-looking pink one is currant jelly and the healthy-looking green one is lettuce. That’s what I call a balanced ration! Fall to!”
The red-headed girl fell to obediently and gratefully.
“I do like the way newspaper people look,” she said when only a few crumbs of the balanced ration remained.
“Ten thousand thanks,” said the newspaper man. “Myself, I do like the way lady authoresses look.”
“I mean I like them because they look so—so awfully alive,” explained the red-headed girl sedately, keeping her eyes on the girl in the flame-coloured blouse lest the cocky young man beside her should read the unladylike interest that he roused in her.