"You speak for us--you say the thing we are too dumb to say. Maybe you are the one who is going to make people listen while we breathe down here under their feet, when we can breathe at all." Letters like this, misspelled, half in a foreign tongue, delivered by hand or coming across the continent, were a part of the work which had become my life. And all the breathlessness, the tremor, the delicious currents of those first days were less real than this new relation, deeper than anything which those first days had dreamed. One day I had forgotten to go to luncheon and, some time after two, Torchido being absent to lecture at a young ladies' seminary, Mr. Ember came bringing me a tray himself. "If any one was to do that you ought to have let me," I cried. "Why?" he demanded. "Now, why? You mean because you're a woman!" "Yes," I admitted, "I suppose that's what I did mean." "You ought to be ashamed of that," he said, "you cave-woman. I don't believe you can cook, anyway." "No," I owned, "I can't cook. And I don't want to cook." "Yet you automatically assume the rôle the moment it presents itself," he charged. "It's always amazing. A man will pick up a woman's handkerchief, help her up a step which she can get up as well as he, walk on the outside of the walk to protect her from lord knows what--and yet the minute that a dish rattles anywhere, he retires, in content and lets her do the whole thing. We're a wondrous lot." "Give us another million years," I begged. "We're coming along." He served me, and ate something himself. And this was the first time that we had broken bread together since that morning at the Dew Drop Inn, when I had ordered salt pork and a piece of pie. Obviously, this was the time to tell him.... My heart began to beat. I played with the moment, thinking as I had thought a hundred times, how I would tell him. Suppose I said: "Do you imagine that this is the first time we have eaten together?" Or, "Do you remember the last time we sat at table?" Or, "Have you ever wondered what became of Cosma Wakely?" I discarded them all, and just then I heard him saying: "I like very well to see you eat, Mademoiselle Secretary. You do it with the tips of your fingers." "Truly?" I cried. And suddenly my eyes brimmed with tears. I remembered Cossy Wakely and her peaches. "What is it?" he asked quickly. But I only said: "Oh, I was just thinking about the 'infinite improvability of the human race'!" Then Lena was summoned home, and she begged me to go with her. She had been for three months at Mrs. Bingy's, and a drawer of my bureau was filled with dainty clothes that, with Mrs. Bingy's help, she had made. We had contributed what we could, and all day long and for long evenings, she had sat contentedly at her work. But she kept putting off home-going, and one night she had told me the reason.