When he essayed the thing Miss Claes spoke of at the Punjabi dinner--he started something which he meant to live up to. The fact that it was harder than he dreamed; an effort, in fact, involving dreary years, hadn’t broken his resolution so far. One of the terms of the Punjabi dinner covenant, for such it had become to him, was not to lose himself in the easy way of hatred, nor to help himself to forgetfulness by casting Pidge Musser’s image out. He knew that the “one” she had spoken of was Rufus Melton. Through months, covering two years, the figure of this young story-writer rose higher and higher in his consciousness, as the person of the Enemy, himself. It was Melton, all unknowing, who vanquished Dicky in his weaknesses, and at best was only kept at bay in his strength. Not to cast her out, not to hate; to know the slow, steady burning of the heart that is focalized upon a woman, and to realize that this woman may be turning to another! There were really extraordinary days of service in Arabia with young Tom Lawrence, whose fame Dicky Cobden helped to make; desert days of camel back and Turk fighting; desert nights of smoke and tea in such starry stillnesses, that one almost expected the Christ to appear; then, after many weeks, mail at Mecca, and one letter from John Higgins, which was read several times: ... You have done several good things for _The Public Square_; but you never did a better thing than wishing Miss Pidge Musser on our editorial rooms. She’s brand new every morning. She’s honest, and a worker. She has brains and a whole lot of psychic viscera, sometimes designated as Soul.... Also she’s a stenographer. Never whispered it until one morning when Maneatin’ Dollie was ill with the flu. My letters were piled up. “Give them to me,” she said. I did that thing, and I’ve been dictating my editorials ever since. It’s like talking to an intelligent audience. When I get opinionated and lose my balance, not seeing the other side of a question, this child sits up and looks disturbed.... I’m sending you separately our Brooklyn Bridge contemporary with a story called _The Salt Pit_. If it isn’t a little man of a story--I don’t know one. Hers.... Of course, you know why she didn’t give it to us. She thought I’d take it on her account and not for the story.... And still we stay out of the War. They’re sending over one big imperialist after another from London, trying to get us in, and all that’s flunkey in Washington, rocks--but so far, we’re only sinning commercially.... Give us more of the inky desert nights, Dicky, and young Lawrence.