"And at that Rob adds a word intending to express a cussing idee, and he outs and down the stairs. And Mis' Toplady starts to take her article right in to Riddy. But in the door she met Riddy, hurrying into the office again. I never see anybody before that looked both red and haggard, but Riddy did. He come right to the point:-- "'Some of you ladies has got to quit handing in--news,' he says, scrabbling for a word to please Mis' Sykes. 'We're up to our eyes in here now. An' there ain't enough room in the paper, either, not without you get out eight pages or else run a supplement or else throw away the whole patent inside. An' those ways, we ain't got enough type even if we had time to burn.' "Mis' Sykes pushed back her green shade, looking just _chased_. "'What does he mean?' she says. 'Can't he tend to his type and things with us doing all the work?' "Riddy took this real nettlish. "'I mean,' s'he, clear but brutal, 'you got to cut your stuff somewheres to the tune of a couple o' columns.' "Well, it's hard to pick out which colour you'll take when you have a new dress only once in every so seldom; or which of your hens you'll kill when you know your chickens like you know your own mind; but these are nothing to the time we had deciding on what to omit out of the paper that night. And the decision hurt us even more than the deciding, for what we left out was Mis' Sturgis's two women's columns. "'We _can't_ leave out meat nor milk nor cleanliness nor the library,' says Mis' Toplady, reasonable, 'because them are the things we live by. An' so with the other write-ups we got planned. But receipts and patterns an' moth balls is only kind o' decorations, seems though. Besides, we all know about 'em, an' it's time we stopped talkin' about 'em, anyway.' "Mis' Sturgis she cried a little on the corner of her shawl. "'The receipts an' patterns an' moth balls is so w-womanly,' she says. "Mis' Toplady whirled round at her. "'If you know anything more womanly than conquerin' dirt an' disease an' the-dead-that-needn't-die,' s'she, 'I'll roll up my sleeves an' be into it. But it won't be eyelet embroidery nor yet boiled frostin'!' "After that they wrote in hasty peace, though four o'clock come racing across the day like a runaway horse, and us not out of its way. And a few minutes past, when Riddy was waiting in the door for Mis' Sykes's last page, somebody most knocked him over, and there come Mis' Holcomb, our circulation editor, purple and white, like a ghost. "'Lock the door--lock it!' she says. 'I've bolted the one to the foot of the stairs. Lock both outside ones an' lay yourselves low!' s'she. "Riddy an' I done the locking, me well knowing Mis' Holcomb couldn't give a false alarm no more than a map could. "'What is it?' we says, pressing Mis' Holcomb to speak, that couldn't even breathe.