I raised the top, whistling softly—one can nearly always manage a little sizzling whistle—then shrank back in terror from what I saw there.—Such chaos as must have been scattered about before sunrise on the morning of the First Day! Was it possible that I had been excited yesterday to the point of leaving the mucilage bottle unstopped?
I set to work, however, with a little sickening sense of shame, to making right the ravages that had taken place.
"A woman may fashion her balloon of anticipation out of silver tissue—but her parachute is always made of sack-cloth!" I groaned.
My desk was really in the wildest disorder. The tin top of the mucilage bottle had disappeared, the bottle had been overturned, its contents had been lavished upon the devoted head of a militant suffragette, and she was pinioned tightly to my blotting-pad.
"The elevator to Success is not running—take the stairs," grinned a framed motto above the desk.
"You take a—back seat!" I said, jumping up and turning the thing to the wall. "What do I care about success, if it's the sort of thing connected with typewriters, offices, copy paper and a pot of paste? I'm—I'm des-qua-mat-ing!"
Never before in my experience had the life of journalistic devotion looked quite so black as the ink that accompanies it.
"Mottoes about success ought to belong to men, anyhow!" I said again, looking up furiously at the drab back of the frame. "I'm not a man, nor cut out for man's work. I'm just a woman, and my head aches!"
I looked again at the militant suffragette, for it was a tragedy to me. I had spent a week of time and five honest dollars in the effort to get that photograph from a New York studio. She wasn't any common suffragette, but a strict head-liner.
"I'm not even a woman—I'm a child to let a little thing like this upset me," I was deciding a while later, when the door of the room opened again and some one entered.