PIDGE read manuscripts in the office of _The Public Square_. She saw them first. The large part of them were seen by no one else. It was like being a telephone girl in a way, dipping into the secrets of a thousand houses. But it was much more subtle than that; the secrets more soulful and revelatory. She saw the hopelessness of life. She saw love, hopelessly uninviting love--puppy love, and much of the “kidding” clever love that is made in America, and proud of itself for that. But over all, there seemed an anguish on the part of male and female, old and young, _to express_. Before her were secrets of those dying for expression; in her hands, the progeny. She loathed the desire everywhere, because she had the same desire herself. Every one who wrote and submitted stories and manuscripts had a “front.” In the personal letters, accompanying their stories and articles and poems, they told matters about themselves which their manuscripts did not. They knew this one and that; they had influential friends who had said this and that about their writing. Parlorfuls of friends “had been quite carried away by the inclosed.”... Others hadn’t wanted to write. They had rebelled long; even as Saul, they had kicked against the pricks; but for the good of others, for the message it would carry to the world, they had given in at last and written their story which was inclosed.... “This is a true story,” one personal letter accompanying said.... “This story may be finished differently,” another wrote. “I have thought out a happy ending, if the public is not ready to stand this human one.”... Here was a sales manager who wrote his personal letter with a jovial laugh: “I have just tossed these few experiences into a story which my friends insist belongs to you.... I wouldn’t think of it, but I can’t help seeing what a rotten lot of stuff the magazines publish!”... This one had decided to write stories because she was a widow and had no other means of support, and had heard that writing was “the pleasantest of professions.”... And here was one who had sent in story after story to rejection for six years. “Some time I will win,” came the thin tired cry. Pidge had fatigued her body in the mill. She tired her heart in the office of _The Public Square_, reaching Harrow Street with something in her breast all sore and shamed. This was the queer strenuous part--the shame of it all. She, too, had fallen into expressing herself, and they had been kind. Miss Claes had been kind and she knew. But Dicky Cobden and John Higgins had been kind, though they hadn’t known the author of the _Lance_. (They would never know.) They had said that the writer had the fine freedom of youth--“the freedom of ignorance.”