So far as anything connected with Walter Babson could be regular, Una became his regular stenographer, besides keeping up her copying. He was always rushing out, apologizing for troubling her, sitting on the edge of her desk, dictating a short letter, and advising her to try his latest brand of health food, which, this spring, was bran biscuits--probably combined with highballs and too much coffee. The other stenographers winked at him, and he teased them about their coiffures and imaginary sweethearts.... For three days the women's coat-room boiled with giggles over Babson's declaration that Miss MacThrostle was engaged to a burglar, and was taking a correspondence course in engraving in order to decorate her poor dear husband's tools with birds and poetic mottoes. Babson was less jocular with Una than with the bouncing girls who were natives of Harlem. But he smiled at her, as though they were understanding friends, and once he said, but quietly, rather respectfully, "You have nice hair--soft." She lay awake to croon that to herself, though she denied that she was in love with this eccentric waster. Always Babson kept up his ejaculations and fidgeting. He often accused himself of shiftlessness and begged her to make sure that he dictated certain matter before he escaped for the evening. "Come in and bother the life out of me. Come in every half-hour," he would say. When she did come in he would crow and chuckle, "Nope. I refuse to be tempted yet; I am a busy man. But maybe I'll give you those verbal jewels of great price on your next visitation, oh thou in the vocative--some Latin scholar, eh? Keep it up, kid; good work. Maybe you'll keep me from being fired." Usually he gave her the dictation before he went. But not always. And once he disappeared for four days--on a drunk, everybody said, in excited office gossip. During Babson's desertion the managing editor called Una in and demanded, "Did Mr. Babson give you some copy about the Manning Wind Shield? No? Will you take a look in his desk for his notes about it?" While Una was fumbling for the notes she did not expect to find, she went through all the agony of the little shawled foreign wife for the husband who has been arrested. "I've got to help you!" she said to _his_ desk, to his bag of Bull Durham, to his alarm-clock--even to a rather shocking collection of pictures of chorus-girls and diaphanously-clad dancers which was pasted inside the double drawer on the right side of the desk. In her great surge of emotion, she noticed these posturing hussies far less than she did a little volume of Rosetti, or the overshoes whose worn toes suddenly revealed to her that Walter Babson, the editor, was not rich--was not, perhaps, so very much better paid than herself. She did not find the notes. She had to go to the managing editor, trembling, all her good little heart wild with pain. The editor's brows made a V at her report, and he grunted, "Well--"