"Well, I was just feeling that at my age--that I was letting my life slip away--accomplishing nothing really worth while. You know--?"

"Yes, we all feel like that sometimes, I guess." Ed Martin nodded with profound solemnity.

Oh, Ed Martin was wonderful! He DID understand things! She went ahead less tremulously now.

"And I was feeling I wanted to get started at something. At something REALLY worth while, you know."

Ed Martin nodded again.

"And I thought, maybe, you could help me get started--or something." She gazed at him with open-eyed trust, as if she expected him with a word to solve her undefined problem.

"Get started?--at writing, you mean?"

Oh, how wonderfully Ed Martin understood!

He shuffled some papers on his desk. "Just what do you want to write, Missy?"

"I don't know, exactly. When I can, I'd like to write something sort of political--or cosmic."

"Oh," said Ed Martin, nodding. He shuffled the papers some more. Then: "Well, when that kind of a germ gets into the system, I guess the best thing to do is to get it out before it causes mischief. If it coagulates in the system, it can cause a lot of mischief."

Just what did he mean?

"Yes, a devil of a lot of mischief," he went on. "But the trouble is, Missy, we haven't got any job on politics or--or the cosmos open just now. But--"

He paused, gazing over her head. Missy felt her heart pause, too.

"Oh, anykind of a writing job," she proffered quaveringly.

"I can't think of anything here that's not taken care of, except"--his glance fell on the ornate-looking "society page" of the Macon City Sunday Journal, spread out on his desk--"a society column."

In her swift breath of ecstasy Missy forgot to note the twinkle in his eye.

"Oh, I'd love to write society things!" Ed Martin sat regarding her with a strange expression on his face.

"Well," he said at last, as if to himself, "why not?" Then, addressing her directly: "You may consider yourself appointed official Society Editor of the Cherryvale Beacon."

The t.i.tle rolled with surpa.s.sing resonance on enchanted ears. She barely caught his next remark.

"And now about the matter of salary--"

Salary! Missy straightened up.

"What do you say to five dollars a week?" he asked.

Five dollars a week!--Five dollars every week! And earned by herself!

Missy's eyes grew big as suns.

"Is that satisfactory?"

"Oh, YES!"

"Well, then," he said, "I'll give you free rein. Just get your copy in by Wednesday night--we go to press Thursdays--and I promise to read every word of it myself."

"Oh," she said.

There were a thousand questions she'd have liked to ask, but Ed Martin, smiling a queer kind of smile, had turned to his papers as if anxious to get at them. No; she mustn't begin by bothering him with questions. He was a busy man, and he'd put this new, big responsibility on HER--"a free rein," he had said. And she must live up to that trust; she must find her own way--study up the problem of society editing, which, even if not her ideal, yet was a wedge to who-knew-what? And meanwhile perhaps she could set a new standard for society columns--brilliant and clever...

Missy left the Beacon office, suffused with emotions no pen, not even her own, could ever have described.

Ed Martin, safely alone, allowed himself the luxury of an extensive grin. Then, even while he smiled, his eyes sobered.

"Poor young one." He sighed and shook his head, then took up the editorial he was writing on the delinquencies of the local waterworks administration.

Meanwhile Missy, moving slowly back up Main Street, was walking on something much softer and springier than the board sidewalk under her feet.

She didn't notice even the cracks, now. The acquaintances who pa.s.sed her, and the people sitting contentedly out on their shady porches, seemed in a different world from the one she was traversing.

She had never known this kind of happiness before--exploring a dream country which promised to become real. Now and then a tiny cloud shadowed the radiance of her emotions: just how would she begin?--what should she write about and how?--but swiftly her thoughts flitted back to that soft, warm, undefined deliciousness...

Society Editor!--she, Melissa Merriam! Her words would be immortalized in print! and she would soar up and up... Some day, in the big magazines... Everybody would read her name there--all Cherryvale--and, perhaps, Ridgeley Holman Dobson would chance a brilliant, authoritative article on some deep, vital subject and wish to meet the author.

She might even have to go to New York to live--New York! And a.s.sociate with the interesting, delightful people there. Maybe he lived in New York, or, anyway, visited there, a.s.sociating with celebrities.

She wished her skirts were long enough to hold up gracefully like Polly Currier walking over there across the street; she wished she had long, dangling ear-rings; she wished...

Dreamy-eyed, the Society Editor of the Cherryvale Beacon turned in at the Merriam gate to announce her estate to an amazed family circle.

Aunt Nettie, of course, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "goodness gracious!" and laughed.

But mother was altogether sweet and satisfying. She looked a little startled at first, but she came over and smoothed her daughter's hair while she listened, and, for some reason, was unusually tender all the afternoon.

That evening at supper-time, Missy noticed that mother walked down the block to meet father, and seemed to be talking earnestly with him on their way toward the house. Missy hadn't much dreaded father's opposition. He was an enormous, silent man and the young people stood in a certain awe of him, but Missy, somehow, felt closer to him than to most old people.

When he came up the steps to the porch where she waited, blushing and palpitant but withal feeling a sense of importance, he greeted her jovially. "Well, I hear we've got a full-fledged writer in our midst!"

Missy's blush deepened.

"What _I_ want to know," father continued, "is who's going to darn my socks? I'm afraid socks go to the d.i.c.kens when genius flies in at the window."

As Missy smiled back at him she resolved, despite everything, to keep father's socks in better order than ever before.

During supper the talk kept coming back to the theme of her Work, but in a friendly, unscoffing way so that Missy knew her parents were really pleased. Mother mentioned Mrs. Brooks's "bridge" Thursday afternoon--that might make a good write-up. And father said he'd get her a leather-bound notebook next day. And when, after supper, instead of joining them on the porch, she brought tablet and pencil and a pile of books and placed them on the dining-table, there were no embarra.s.sing comments, and she was left alone with her thrills and puzzlements.

Among the books were Stevenson's "Some Technical Considerations of Style," George Eliot's "Romola" and Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus"; the latter two being of the kind that especially lifted you to a mood of aching to express things beautifully. Missy liked books that lifted you up. She loved the long-drawn introspections of George Eliot and Augusta J. Evans; the tender whimsy of Barrie as she'd met him through "Margaret Ogilvie" and "Sentimental Tommy"; the fascinating mysteries of Marie Corelli; the colourful appeal of "To Have and To Hold" and the other "historical romances" which were having a vogue in that era; and Kipling's India!--that was almost best of all. She had outgrown most of her earlier loves--Miss Alcott whom she'd once known intimately, and "Little Lord Fauntleroy" and "The Birds' Christmas Carol" had survived, too, her brief illicit pa.s.sion for the exotic product of "The d.u.c.h.ess."

And she didn't respond keenly to many of the "best sellers" which were then in their spectacular, flamboyantly advertised heyday; somehow they failed to stimulate the mind, stir the imagination, excite the emotions--didn't lift you up. Yet she could find plenty of books in the Library which satisfied.

Now she sat, reading the introspections of "Romola" till she felt her own soul stretching out--up and beyond the gas table-lamp glowing there in such lovely serenity through its gold-gla.s.s shade; felt it aching to express something, she knew not what.