"I'm not," she confessed, biting her lip. "I oughtn't to talk to you about it, but there isn't anybody here that would understand. They think I'm stuck up when I talk about books and music and--and other kind of people. They just keep on doing the same stupid things till they get old and die. Only mother won't even let me do stupid things; she says I bother her when I try to help around the house." "Can't you sew or make mottoes or something?" asked Mr. Opp, very vague as to feminine accomplishments. "What's the use?" asked the girl. "Mother does everything for me. She always says she'd rather do it than teach me how." "Don't you take to reading?" asked Mr. Opp. "Oh, yes," she said; "I used to read all the time down at school; but there never is anything to read up here." The editor-elect peopled the country with similar cases, and he immediately saw himself as a public benefactor supplying starved subscribers with a bountiful repast of weekly news. "Won't you sit down?" asked the girl, interrupting his reflections. "I don't know what can be keeping mother." Mr. Opp looked about for a chair, but there was none. Then he glanced at his companion, and saw that she was holding aside her pink skirt and evidently offering him a seat beside her in the hammock. He advanced a step, retreated, then weakly capitulated. Sitting very rigid, nursing his hat on his knees, and inserting his forefinger between his neck and his collar as if to breathe better, he remarked that it was getting warmer all the time. "This isn't anything to what it will be later," said the girl; "it keeps on getting hotter and dustier all the time. I don't believe there's such a stupid, poky, little old place anywhere else in the world. You ought to be mighty glad you don't live here." Mr. Opp cleared his throat with some dignity. "I expect to remain here permanent now. I--well--the truth is, I have decided to operate a newspaper here." "No!" cried the girl, incredulously. "Not in the Cove!" "In the Cove," repeated Mr. Opp, firmly. "There's great need here for a live, enterprising newspaper. It's a virgin field, you might say. There never was a place that needed a public voice more. My paper is going to be a voice that hears all sides of a question; it's going to appeal to the aged and the young and all them that lies between." "It will be mighty grand for us!" said his companion, with interest. "When is it going to start?" Definite plans being decidedly nebulous, Mr. Opp wisely confined himself to generalities. He touched casually on his remarkable fitness for the work, his wide experience, his worldly knowledge. He hinted that in time he expected to venture into even deeper literary waters--poetry, and a novel, perhaps. As he talked, he realized that for the second time that day he was looked upon with approval. Being accepted at his own estimate proved a new and exhilarating sensation.