"Ah! now I see why the fates drove me forth upon the highway this morning," said he. "Do you know that I have a large volume of work for an expert typist, and that I have thus far felt that my present isolation in the desert wastes was an almost unsurmountable obstacle to having the work done in a satisfactory manner? I have been engaged upon a certain work on sociological problems and how they have developed with the growth of civilization. You will readily apprehend that great care must be exercised in making the copy practically letter perfect. Furthermore, I find myself constantly revising the manuscript. I should want to supervise the work rather closely, and for that reason I have not as yet arranged for the final typing. "Now if you care to assume the task, I can assure you that I shall feel tremendously grateful, besides making adequate remuneration for the labor involved." That is the way he put it, and that is how it happened that Helen May let herself in for the hardest piece of work she had ever attempted since she sold gloves at Bullocks' all day and attended night school all the evening, learning shorthand and typewriting and bookkeeping, and permitting the white plague to fasten itself upon her while she bent to her studies. She let herself in for it because she believed she had plenty of time, and because Holman Sommers was in no hurry for the manuscript, which he did not expect to see completed for a year or so, since a work so erudite required much time and thought, being altogether different from current fiction, which requires none at all. Helen May was secretly aghast at the pile of scrawled writing interlined and crossed out, with marginal notes and footnotes and references and what not; but she let herself in for the job of typing his book for him--which is enough for the present. CHAPTER NINE PAT, A NICE DOGGUMS "'The human polyp incessantly builds upon a coral reef. They become lithified as it were and constitute the strata of the psychozoic stage'--I told you the butter's at the spring. Will you leave me alone? That's the third page I've spoiled over psycho-what-you-call-it. Go on back and herd your goats, and for gracious sake, can that tulip-and-rose song! I hate it." Helen May ripped a page with two carbon copies out of the machine, pulled out the carbons and crumpled three sheets of paper into a ball which she threw into a far corner. "Gee, but you're pecky to-day! You act like an extra slammed into a sob lead and gettin' up stage about it. I wish that long-worded hide had never showed up with his soiled package of nut science. A feller can't _live_ with you, by gosh, since you--" "Well, listen to this, Vic! 'There is a radical difference between organic and social evolution, the formula most easily expressing this distinction being that environment transforms the animal, while man transforms the environment. This transformation--'"