She that we called the Princess worked in the office less than two years, but the memory of her still lingers, though hardly could one say like "the scent of the roses"; for the Princess was not merely a poor compositor, she was the kind that would make mistakes and blame others for them, and that kind never learns. Though she ran away to marry Red Martin--which was her own mistake--this habit of blaming others for her faults was so strong that she never forgave her mother for making the match. We know in our office that Mrs. Swaney did not dream that the girl was even going with Red Martin until they were married. Yet the Martin neighbours for twenty years have blamed Mrs. Swaney. When the Princess was in the office we found out that the truth wasn't in her; also we discovered that she was lazy and that she cried too easily. Right at the busy hour in the afternoon we used to catch her with a type in her fingers and her hand poised in the air, looking off into space for a minute at a time, and when we spoke to her she would put her head on her case and cry softly; and the foreman would have to apologise before she would go back to work. Even then she would have to take the broken piece of looking-glass that she kept in her capital "K" box and make an elaborate toilet before settling down. Moreover, though she was only seventeen, much of the foreman's time was spent chasing dirty-faced little boys away from her case, and if some boy didn't have his elbow in her quad box, she was off her stool visiting either with some other girl, or standing by the stove drying her hands--she was eternally drying her hands--and talking to one of the men. In all the year and a half that she was in the office the Princess never learned how to help herself. When she had to dump her type, she had to call some man from his work to help her--and then there would be more conversation. But we kept her and were patient with her on account of her father, John Swaney, a hard-working man who was trying to make something of the Princess, so we put up with her perfumery and her powder rags and her royal airs, and did all we could to teach her the difference between a comma and a period--though she never really learned; and we were still patient with her, even when she deliberately pied a lot of type after being corrected for some piece of carelessness or worse. We made due allowances for the Rutherford temper, which her father warned us not to arouse. Nevertheless, her mother came to the office one winter day in her black straw hat with a veil around it, and with the coat she had worn for ten years, to tell us that she was afraid working in the shop would hurt her daughter's social standing. So the Princess walked out that night in a gust of musk--in her picture hat and sweeping cloak, with bangles tinkling and petticoat swishing--and the office knew her no more forever.