"Oh, I know, Yetta. Just loving you doesn't give me a right to ask that question. But sometimes I've thought you loved Walter. He's my best friend. He wouldn't want you to go into this." He looked at her tensely. It was a minute before she took up his challenge. "I care a great deal for Walter's good opinion," her voice was low, but even. "I am quite sure he would be glad I had this chance. But even if he thought it was unwise for me to accept it, he would not try to browbeat me." Isadore had shot his last bolt, it had rebounded on his own head. He fumbled for his hat. "Good night, Yetta," he said. "Good night, Mr. Braun." The first month, Mr. Brace went over Yetta's contributions in detail, cramming into her all the advice he could think of. About the time his stock of journalistic epigrams ran out, the reports from the circulation manager were so favorable, that he decided he could give his attention to other things. Mr. Brace, like all good newspaper men, was a mystic in such matters. God only knows what the public will like. It was his business to scatter seeds. If they took root and grew into "circulation," he had sense enough to leave them alone. And Yetta's column had "caught on." At the end of three months the contract was renewed with a substantial increase in salary. The posters which advertised her work became more flamboyant. The size of her mail grew daily. The letters dealt with all the worries working girls are heirs to. Some of them were frivolous, most were commonplace. But once in a while among the misspelt, poorly written scrawls, there would be a throbbing story of life. Such letters tore at Yetta's heart--giving her new determinations, new enthusiasm for her work. As their number increased Yetta knew that her audience, her influence, was growing. The Fates were smiling at her. She was earning more money than she had ever hoped. Better still, she had as much time as before for the League work. She was rarely kept in the office after noon. It did not occur to her that she might have demanded an increase in salary on the ground of the free advertising she was giving _The Star_ by her frequent speeches. She was disappointed, however, not to be able to establish more cordial relations with her fellow-workers. These newspaper people, men and women, worked under as great a strain as any sweat-shop girls, but they seemed more foreign to her--to her class--than the rich uptown women she had met through the League. They had many good qualities which she appreciated--their _esprit de corps_, their hearty, open manners, the camaraderie with which they lent each other money. But they were shot through with a cynicism which shocked her. The whole situation was typified in the case of Maud Ripley, a special story writer, who tried to "take her up."