The room was bare of ornament; the desk and a couple of chairs were its only furniture. Pictures there were none. Their places were taken by photographs and a great blue print of the shipbuilder's plans and specifications of the Freja. The photographs were some of those that Dennison had made of the expedition--the Freja nipped in the ice, a group of the officers and crew upon the forward deck, the coast of Wrangel Island, Cape Kammeni, peculiar ice formations, views of the pack under different conditions and temperatures, pressure-ridges and scenes of the expedition's daily life in the arctic, bear-hunts, the manufacture of sledges, dog-teams, Bennett taking soundings and reading the wind-gauge, and one, the last view of the Freja, taken just as the ship--her ice-sheathed dripping bows heaved high in the air, the flag still at the peak--sank from sight. However, on the wall over the blue-print plans of the Freja, one of the boat's flags, that had been used by the expedition throughout all the time of its stay in the ice, hung suspended--a faded, tattered square of stars and bars. As the new life settled quietly and evenly to its grooves a routine began to develop. About an hour after breakfast Lloyd and Bennett shut themselves in Bennett's "workroom," as he called it, Lloyd taking her place at the desk. She had become his amanuensis, had insisted upon writing to his dictation. "Look at that manuscript," she had exclaimed one day, turning the sheets that Bennett had written; "literally the very worst handwriting I have ever seen. What do you suppose a printer would make out of your 'thes' and 'ands'? It's hieroglyphics, you know," she informed him gravely, nodding her head at him. It was quite true. Bennett wrote with amazing rapidity and with ragged, vigorous strokes of the pen, not unfrequently driving the point through the paper itself; his script was pothooks, clumsy, slanting in all directions, all but illegible. In the end Lloyd had almost pushed him from his place at the desk, taking the pen from between his fingers, exclaiming: "Get up! Give me your chair--and that pen. Handwriting like that is nothing else but a sin." Bennett allowed her to bully him, protesting merely for the enjoyment of squabbling with her. "Come, I like this. What are you doing in my workroom anyhow, Mrs. Bennett? I think you had better go to your housework." "Don't talk," she answered. "Here are your notes and journal. Now tell me what to write."