“But they tell me on my floor when you first came, you hammered a typemill day and night. Was it commercial work?” Dicky asked.
“It was not,” said Pidge, with such emphasis that she felt her secret endangered again and hastened to add, “That was before I started to work in the factory. Likely they heard Nagar’s machine part of the time.”
“But you seem to know yarns—like one who works with them—tries to do them, I mean,” he remarked.
Her face was flushed. Evasion irritated and diminished her. She coldly explained her father’s professional interest in the short story.
“He isn’t an artist, but he teaches how, you know,” she finished.
Dicky pondered long on how much Pidge meant by this. He had been brought up to revere his parents. Surely, he thought, she must know that one can’t be taught except by life itself to do a real story.
One rainy Sunday forenoon in February, they were sitting together in his “parlor,” the front of his two rooms on the second floor. This room opened through a single door to the main hall, and through folding doors to his sleeping quarters. Dicky had brought some few additional furnishings from his mother’s house in East Fiftieth Street. The place made Pidge feel uncomfortable, but Miss Claes’ basement front was often in use and subject to constant interruption.
“I want to read you something I’ve brought from the office,” Dicky said. “I’m not saying a word—until afterward.”
It was a little story called Dr. Filter, by an unknown young man, named Rufus Melton. It had come to The Public Square among the unsolicited manuscripts. Pidge listened with extraordinary restlessness. She seemed to know so much about this story, its processes and the thing it told, that her mind was unpleasantly crowded. It wasn’t a matter of like or dislike. Dr. Filter was here in the world, a live thing. It had to be met and dealt with.
“Not more than once a year, one comes in as live as this,” Dicky said. “Yet it’s like something from a different world from Nagar’s Little Man story.”