Presently she would go out and look at New York again; walk about a bit, keeping a mental string tied to this green house. Besides she had to rent a typewriter, but there was no rush. It was delicious sitting here alone in the gloom of midday, making the place her own, locked in—a chance at last to take a look at herself and see what she was made of and think of what she was here for.

There was a mirror. It wasn’t cracked, according to tradition, but its surface had frozen over in a high wind. Everything waved, eternally waved. It gave the sense of air in the room, and made one look mended. Pidge hoped she would never shed tears in that mirror. Once she had caught herself weeping, and she looked so abysmal that she was almost frightened out of the habit. With these waves added—— Pidge took off her hat and flipped it over on the cot. Her head didn’t look natural, but that wasn’t all the mirror’s fault. One of the things she had wanted to do for months was to make her hair a shade redder than it was. Of course, she hadn’t dared at home, and she couldn’t manage it on the train, but there had been six hours to wait in Chicago and a small hotel room that frightened her yet. She had emerged from that room a different shade, so Chicago meant henna and rain and a frightful hotel. It would always be so. She had been against landing in New York one color and then changing. She had wanted to start life new in New York and keep it straight, an absolutely new page, a new book.

Her reddened hair waved. It made her face look whiter, and brought out a red tint to her wool dress that had been brown as apple-butter before.

Everything about her was tired. If she took off her new shoes she was afraid she would never get them on again to-day, and she had to think of renting that typewriter. A little later, she sat up straight, because through the wall from the next room back came the buzz of a machine. She listened with a thrill. It stopped and went on—unequal stops and buzzes of rapid typing for several minutes; then a long sustained buzz, until a sheet was changed. No commercial typewriting. That was “creative” stuff, as her father would say—a word she had vowed never to use. At least, some one in there was doing a letter.

All this was before noon on an October day in the good year of 1913, before anything ever happened to anybody.

II
THE COLORED MAN

Once there was an old sculptor who had apprentices. Townsfolk were invited on a certain day to look at the work of the young men. One of the apprentices was greatly worried by the faulty light of the shop in which his exhibit was placed. He complained about it to his master, who is said to have answered in these terms: “Never mind, son, about the light here. It is the light of the public square that tells the story.”

RICHARD COBDEN was twenty-one in 1910, and fresh from his university, when he took his first job as reader in the editorial office of The Public Square, a weekly magazine of opinion and protest and qualified patriotism. This was the publication of old John Higgins, at one time one of the highest-priced editorial writers in New York; but Higgins’ views had become more and more strenuous, instead of mollifying with the years, the end of which is to publish for one’s self or subside. Even in The Public Square he found himself under a pull. He wanted a living out of his magazine, but did not expect to make money. He occasionally drank himself ill for a day or two. One of his aspirations was to publish a distinguished short story in each issue, the shorter the better.

“But there aren’t fifty a year,” he frequently said. “There aren’t ten, but we get two or three of them.”

Richard Cobden came of a well-established New York family of merchants and manufacturers. There was no traceable connection, so far as the family knew, with the English Cobdens, of whom there had been a brave Richard of free trade and free speech. Dicky’s great-grandfather was the Richard Cobden who first made the Cobden trowel, hand-forged in a little shop up Yonkers way, and made it so well that stone masons used to drive from far in back country to his shop. The Cobdens had made and dealt in hardware ever since, but the trowel was the Cobden cachet.