"Yes," I replied, taking it away, and assuming a more properly dignified air. "I hope you have risen above seven a week and a broom; and I am glad to see that your head has healed up." "Thank you," he replied. "I am running the installation department of the dynamo end of the business. And you? I'm no end glad to see you back. Did you get canned for letting me in? I've had a good many bad half-hours since I found you gone, thinking of you out hunting a job on--on my account. You--pardon me--don't look like a girl who would have the E. M. F. in the nerve-department to go out and compete, you know." I was amazed at the creature's effrontery, at first; and then the whole situation cleared up in my mind. I saw that I had an admirer (_that_ was plain) who didn't know me as Rollin Blunt's heiress at all, but only as a shop-mate in the Mid-Continent Electric Company's factory--a stenographer who had done him a favor. It was more fun than most girls might think. "How did you find out," said I, "that I had been--ah--canned?" "I watched for you," he replied. "Began as soon as my promotion to the switchboard work made it so I could. After a couple of months' accumulation of data I ventured upon the generalization that the old man--" "The who?" "Mr. Blunt, I mean, of course," he amended, "had fired you for letting me in. Out of work long?" "N-no," said I; "hardly a week." "Where are you now?" he asked. "I'm in a shop," I stammered, "in Michigan Avenue." I looked about to see if any of the employees who knew me were present, but could see none except Miss Crowley, who wouldn't meet a man in the same office in a year, and a dynamo-man never, and who is near-sighted, anyhow. So I felt safe in permitting him to deceive himself. It is thus that the centuries of oppression which women have endured impress themselves on our more involuntary actions in little bits of disingenuousness against which we should ever struggle. At the time, though, to sit chatting with him in the informal manner of co-laborers at the noon intermission was great fun. It was then that I began to notice more fully what a really fine figure he had, and how brown and honest and respectful his eyes were, even when he said "Hello" to me; as if I were a telephone, and how thrilling was his voice. "I'd like," said he, "to call on you--if I might." I was as fluttered as the veriest little chit from the country. "I--I can't very well receive you," said I. "My--the people where I--I stop wouldn't like it."