This was but one of her pictures. Other times she roamed the canyons, Santa Monica and Topango, and the cheerful and solitary mesas.... “Yes, that same creature--Pan Musser,” she once said, half aloud.... Then she would think of New York and Miss Claes and Richard Cobden; of the book she had actually written, and pretty nearly died for, the book around which there was a conspiracy of silence. In spite of the coma at the pasting table, and the moments of memory drift, the stimulated laughter in the washroom, or in the half hour for lunch as they heated their tea pails over the radiators at noon; in spite of the clatter of tins passing from left to right around the big table, and the tireless goading of Fanny Gallup’s cheerful boy-talk--the brown wool dress contained plentiful hells of the human heart.... And to-morrow would be Thursday, the next day Friday, the next day Saturday, and then sleep, and this was also New York. The first Sunday afternoon of March was the afternoon of the new frock, a cheap little one-piece dress, bought on Seventh Avenue, neither wool nor brown. It had a tissuey and boxy smell. It was rapturously, adventurously new. Pidge had an omen as she put it on, that this was a sort of hour of all her life, that never another frock would mean quite the same. She was alone with Miss Claes when Dicky Cobden came for her at six, according to a plan made early in the week. They were to cross to Staten Island and find an old Georgian mammy, whom he knew, somewhere back of Stapleton on the wet roads, a mammy who could cook chicken and beaten biscuit. Dicky seemed only to see her face. A great wonderment came up in Pidge’s heart, not disappointment exactly, but a sort of soul-deep wonder, that Dicky didn’t appear to see the new frock. Could it be possible that a man who managed the details of his own attire with such practiced art had never known what she suffered in the brown wool dress, in all that tragedy of shabbiness and dirt? Had he really not felt ashamed of her that night under the lights in the uptown theater? He turned to her now: “You won’t mind, Pidge, just a moment or two, if I speak of a little matter to Miss Claes. Oh, I don’t mean for you to leave; in fact, I’d rather not. It is just a report about a long story that should have been made before.” Then out of the inmost heart of innocence, Pidge was jerked with a crush. Before his next words she realized what she must face; she, sitting aside from them in the new frock. “... About that book manuscript,” Dicky went on. “I have ordered it sent back to you, Miss Claes--doubtless it will be in the post to-morrow. I have read it, and John Higgins has read it. We’re both agreed on this particular manuscript--that it isn’t for _The Public Square_.”