THEY were ensconced in the two upper rooms. Pidge kept up her work at _The Public Square_, and did not come home for luncheon. She had told John Higgins of her marriage but the subject was not mentioned afterward. The old chief vanished for three days following the news, and when he came back there was a new dignity on his part for Pidge to cope with. She found her position a trifle uncentered. His old stenographer took his letters, and he wrote his editorials on his own machine as aforetime. John Higgins said little, but found flaws in her judgments that had not appeared before. He no longer risked availing himself of her entire equipment; this change being apparently on the basis that he dare not get used to it all over again. He seemed to hold the idea that it was only a question of days at most before a married woman would forget place and town entirely and rush off to pick up pieces of wool and thread for a nest. Pidge had built so much of herself into her work that there was emphatic pain in the new conditions. She needed the work more than ever now, but _The Public Square_ was falling into sorry days and ways. There was nothing to say but War, and if you didn’t like War, didn’t see the divine uses of War and say so, you had better say nothing. There was no field in the world at this time for a magazine of dignified or any other kind of protest, and in the steady loss of money week after week, the struggle became one of great simplicity--to stay alive. “Higgins is a rotten old knocker anyway,” said Rufus Melton. “This is a time for Americans to stand together and not criticize the government. He never did pay any real money for his stuff, but was always ready to tell you where you fell down. They’re telling him a word or two now.” So Pidge didn’t speak much of _The Public Square_ at home. Rufus vibrated between a depression when his stuff wouldn’t come through and an exaltation when it did. He was quite sincere in his industry, but slept late in the morning. Pidge was up and away four mornings out of five without waking him. Sometimes Rufe decided to eat his “big meal of the day” in the middle of the afternoon, in which case Pidge supped alone. He was slow to get his work started, so that it was often evening before he got “all of himself working at once.” Then he was apt to stay with it for several hours, in which case Pidge could sleep if she got a chance. Occasionally he found that he could dictate a bit of first draft and Pidge undertook at first to help him in this way, but when she perceived that it didn’t occur to him, in the flush of his evening powers, that she had worked all day and must work to-morrow, she decided to stay off his night work. “I can’t, Rufe,” she said one night on the way to bed. “It’s so fascinating to practice napping in the hushes and rushes of your machine.” “You won’t take this stuff?” “No.” “You won’t?”