"He won't interfere much," she observed. "He's in the cannery all day and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."
"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me that I wish sometime to meet Peter."
"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"
"My dear child!" I exclaimed.
"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being one."
I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her—not by now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in many a little mechanical task. She listened, and, when I had made an end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.
"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh. "Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your best."
"But it is," I told her.
"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do just exactly what you're told. Your best tells you how to do itself."
At this naïve putting of the personal equation which should play so powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial utterance.