There was a mirror. It wasn’t cracked, according to tradition, but its surface had frozen over in a high wind. Everything waved, eternally waved. It gave the sense of air in the room, and made one look mended. Pidge hoped she would never shed tears in that mirror. Once she had caught herself weeping, and she looked so abysmal that she was almost frightened out of the habit. With these waves added---- Pidge took off her hat and flipped it over on the cot. Her head didn’t look natural, but that wasn’t all the mirror’s fault. One of the things she had wanted to do for months was to make her hair a shade redder than it was. Of course, she hadn’t dared at home, and she couldn’t manage it on the train, but there had been six hours to wait in Chicago and a small hotel room that frightened her yet. She had emerged from that room a different shade, so Chicago meant henna and rain and a frightful hotel. It would always be so. She had been against landing in New York one color and then changing. She had wanted to start life new in New York and keep it straight, an absolutely new page, a new book. Her reddened hair waved. It made her face look whiter, and brought out a red tint to her wool dress that had been brown as apple-butter before. Everything about her was tired. If she took off her new shoes she was afraid she would never get them on again to-day, and she had to think of renting that typewriter. A little later, she sat up straight, because through the wall from the next room back came the buzz of a machine. She listened with a thrill. It stopped and went on--unequal stops and buzzes of rapid typing for several minutes; then a long sustained buzz, until a sheet was changed. No commercial typewriting. That was “creative” stuff, as her father would say--a word she had vowed never to use. At least, some one in there was doing a letter. All this was before noon on an October day in the good year of 1913, before anything ever happened to anybody. II THE COLORED MAN Once there was an old sculptor who had apprentices. Townsfolk were invited on a certain day to look at the work of the young men. One of the apprentices was greatly worried by the faulty light of the shop in which his exhibit was placed. He complained about it to his master, who is said to have answered in these terms: “Never mind, son, about the light here. It is the light of the public square that tells the story.”