“Has Professor Lee explained to you the nature of our work?” he wanted to know.
“No,” she replied, half grimly, a little humourously, and not far from tearfully, “he didn't—explain.”
“Then it is my pleasure to inform you,” he began, blinking at her importantly, “that we are engaged here in the making of a dictionary.”
“A dic—?” but she swallowed the gasp in the laugh coming up to meet it, and of their union was born a saving cough.
“Quite an overpowering thought, is it not?” he agreed pleasantly. “Now you see you have before you the two dictionaries you will use most, and over in that case you will find other references. The main thing”—his voice sank to an impressive whisper—“is not to infringe the copyright. The publisher was in yesterday and made a little talk to the force, and he said that any one who handed in a piece of copy infringing the copyright simply employed that means of writing his own resignation. Neat way of putting it, was it not?”
“Yes, wasn't it—neat?” she agreed, wildly.
She was conscious of a man's having stepped in behind her and taken a seat at the table next hers. She heard him opening his dictionaries and getting out his paper. Then the man in the skull cap had risen and was saying genially: “Well, here is a piece of old Webster, your first 'take'—no copyright on this, you see, but you must modernise and expand. Don't miss any of the good words in either of these dictionaries. Here you have dictionaries, copy-paper, paste, and Professor Lee assures me you have brains—all the necessary ingredients for successful lexicography. We are to have some rules printed to-morrow, and in the meantime I trust I've made myself clear. The main thing”—he bent down and spoke it solemnly—“is not to infringe the copyright.” With a cheerful nod he was gone, and she heard him saying to the man at the next table: “Mr. Clifford, I shall have to ask you to be more careful about getting in promptly at eight.”
She removed the cover from her paste-pot and dabbled a little on a piece of paper. Then she tried the unwieldy shears on another piece of paper. She then opened one of her dictionaries and read studiously for fifteen minutes. That accomplished, she opened the other dictionary and pursued it for twelve minutes. Then she took the column of “old Webster,” which had been handed her pasted on a piece of yellow paper, and set about attempting to commit it to memory. She looked up to be met with the statement that Mrs. Marjory Van Luce De Vane, after spending years under the so-called best surgeons of the country, had been cured in six weeks by Dr. Bunting's Famous Kidney and Bladder Cure. She pushed the dictionaries petulantly from her, and leaning her very red cheek upon her hand, her hazel eyes blurred with tears of perplexity and resentment, her mouth drawn in pathetic little lines of uncertainty, looked over at the sprawling warehouse on the opposite side of Dearborn Street. She was just considering the direct manner of writing one's resignation—not knowing how to infringe the copyright—when a voice said: “I beg pardon, but I wonder if I can help you any?”
She had never heard a voice like that before. Or, had she heard it?—and where? She looked at him, a long, startled gaze. Something made her think of the voice the prince used to have in long-ago dreams. She looked into a face that was dark and thin and—different. Two very dark eyes were looking at her kindly, and a mouth which was a baffling combination of things to be loved and things to be deplored was twitching a little, as though it would like to join the eyes in a smile, if it dared.
Because he saw both how funny and how hard it was, she liked him. It would have been quite different had he seen either one without the other.