So it was through the hours, pasting apricot labels, lobster, asparagus, pimento, peach, and codfish labels. More and more Fanny’s boys and men folded into one, whose name was Albert. “I’m gettin’ him goin’--goin’, goin’. Psst! an’ he comes!” Fanny would say. “But I wouldn’t trust him to you, Musser--not longer than a hairpin, dam’ little party, you.” * * * * * Miss Claes was observing with some concern the result of her suggestion to Pidge, not to let the young editor know the _Lance_ was hers. “If it hadn’t been for my tampering, she would have heard about her book before this,” she said to Nagar. “Pidge looked so young, I felt it would prejudice Mr. Cobden against her work. He’s fascinated with Harrow Street, but seems to have no time or thought for a romance of eighteenth-century France! Yet he would have put through her book in a week, if he knew, seeing the story with the same eyes he sees the author.” “And she doesn’t tell him?” “No. That’s our Pidge, Nagar. I even suggested that I would speak to him--let the truth slip out. She caught me in her hands, those hard little hands, strong as a peasant’s, ‘Not for worlds, Miss Claes!’ she breathed, and there was a patch of white intensity across her upper lip, ‘Not for worlds!’” “... Of course, I mean to write,” Pidge had granted to Dicky in the very beginning. “I’ve always meant to write, since the day I learned that print wasn’t done above the clouds somehow, like Moses’ tablets, and had to be written all out first by human beings. But I’m not ready to begin----” and she silently added the word “again” for her own composure. “But they tell me on my floor when you first came, you hammered a typemill day and night. Was it commercial work?” Dicky asked. “It was _not_,” said Pidge, with such emphasis that she felt her secret endangered again and hastened to add, “That was before I started to work in the factory. Likely they heard Nagar’s machine part of the time.” “But you seem to know yarns--like one who works with them--tries to do them, I mean,” he remarked. Her face was flushed. Evasion irritated and diminished her. She coldly explained her father’s professional interest in the short story. “He isn’t an artist, but he teaches how, you know,” she finished. Dicky pondered long on how much Pidge meant by this. He had been brought up to revere his parents. Surely, he thought, she must know that one can’t be taught except by life itself to do a real story. One rainy Sunday forenoon in February, they were sitting together in his “parlor,” the front of his two rooms on the second floor. This room opened through a single door to the main hall, and through folding doors to his sleeping quarters. Dicky had brought some few additional furnishings from his mother’s house in East Fiftieth Street. The place made Pidge feel uncomfortable, but Miss Claes’ basement front was often in use and subject to constant interruption.