Amazing Grace, Who Proves That Virtue Has Its Silver Lining. Kate Trimble Sharber
all else you want a Husband with a sense of Humor!"
"But how could this letter affect all this?" I asked myself, stopping at the foot of the steps to take a message in rich vellum stationery from my bag. "How can so much be contained in one little envelope?"
After all, this was what it said:
"My dear Miss Christie:
"While in Oldburgh recently on a visit to Mr. Clarence Wiley"—he was the author of blood-and-thunder detective stories who lived on Waverley Pike and raised pansies between times—"I learned that you are in possession of the love-letters written by the famous Lady Frances Webb to your illustrious ancestor, James Mackenzie Christie. Mr. Wiley himself was my informer, and being a friend of your family was naturally able to give me much interesting information about the remaining evidences of this widely-discussed affair.
"No doubt the idea has occurred to you that the love-letters of a celebrated English novelist to the first American artist of his time would make valuable reading matter for the public; and the suggestion of these letters being done into a book has made such charming appeal to my mind that I resolved to put the matter before you without delay.
"To be perfectly plain and direct, this inheritance of yours can be made into a small fortune for you, since the material, properly handled, would make one of the best-selling books of the decade.
"If you are interested I shall be glad to hear from you, and we can then take up at once the business details of the transaction. Mr. Wiley spoke in such high praise of the literary value of the letters that my enthusiasm has been keenly aroused.
"With all good wishes, I am,
"Very sincerely yours,
"Julien J. Dutweiler."
There was an embossed superscription on the envelope's flap which read: "Coburn-Colt Company, Publishers, Philadelphia." They were America's best-known promoters—the kind who could take six inches of advertising and a red-and-gold binding and make a mountain out of a mole-hill.
"'Small fortune!'" I repeated. "Surely a great temptation does descend during a hungry spell—in real life, as well as in human documents."
CHAPTER II
A GLIMPSE OF PROMISED LAND
"Hello, Grace!"
I was passing the society editor in her den a moment later, and she called out a cheery greeting, although she didn't look up from her task. She was polishing her finger-nails as busily as if she lived for her hands—not by them.
"Hello, Jane!"
My very voice was out of alignment, however, as I spoke.
"Are you going to let all the world see that you're not a headstrong woman?" something inside my pride asked angrily, but as if for corroboration of my conscientious whisperings, I looked in a shamefaced way at the lines of my palm.—The head-line was weak and isolated—while the heart-line was as crisscrossed as a centipede track!
But a heart-line has nothing at all to do with a city editor's desk—certainly not on a day when the crumpled balls of copy paper lying about his waste-basket look as if a woman had thrown them! Every one had missed its mark, and up and down the length of the room the typewriters were clicking falsetto notes. The files of papers on the table were in as much confusion as patterns for heathen petticoats at a missionary meeting.
"What's up?"
I had made my way to the desk of the sporting editor, who writes poetry and pretends he's so aerial that he never knows what day of the week it is, but when you pin him down he can tell you exactly what you want to know—from the color of the bride's going-away gown to the amount the bridegroom borrowed on his life insurance policy.
"Search me!" he answered—as usual.
"But there's something going on in this office!" I insisted. "Everybody looks as exercised as if the baby'd just swallowed a moth-ball."
"Huh?"
He looked around—then opened his eyes wider. "Oh, I believe I did hear 'em say—"
"What?"
"That they can't get hold of that story about the Consolidated Traction Company."
"—And damn those foreigners who come over here with their fool notions of dignity!" broke in the voice of the city editor—then stopped and blushed when he saw me within ear-shot, for it's a rule of the office that no one shall say "damn" without blushing, except the society editor and her assistants.
"Who's the foreigner?" I asked, for the sake of warding off apologies. That's why men object so strongly to women mixing up with them in business life. It keeps them eternally apologizing.
"Maitland Tait," he replied.
"Maitland Tait? But that's not foreign. That's perfectly good English."
"So's he!" the city editor snapped. "It's his confounded John Bullishness that's causing all the trouble."
"But the traction company's no kin to us, is it?" the poet inquired crossly, for he was reporting a double-header in verse, and our chatter annoyed him.
"Trouble will be kin to us—if somebody doesn't break in on Great Britain and make him cough up the story," the city editor warned over his shoulder. "I've already sent Clemons and Bolton and Reade."
"—And it would mean a raise," the poet said, with a tender little smile. "A raise!"
"Are you sure?" I asked, after the superior officer had disappeared. "I'd like—a raise."
He looked at me contemptuously.
"You don't know what the Consolidated Traction Company is, I suppose?" he asked.
My business on the paper was reporting art meetings at the Carnegie Library and donation affairs at settlement homes because the owner and publisher drank out of the same canteen with my grandfather—and my fellows on the staff called me behind my back their ornamental member.
"I do!" I bristled. "It's located at a greasy place, called Loomis—and it's something that makes the wheels go round."
He smiled.
"It certainly does in Oldburgh," he said. "It's the biggest thing we have, next to our own cotton mills and to think that they're threatening to take their doll-rags and move to Birmingham and leave us desolate!"
"Where the iron would be nearer?" I asked, and he fairly beamed.
"Sure! Say, if you know that much about the company's affairs, why don't you try for this assignment yourself?"
But I shook my head.
"I've got relatives in Alabama—that's how I knew that iron grows on trees down there," I explained.
"Well—that's what the trouble is about! Oldburgh can't tell whether this fellow, Maitland Tait, is going to pack the 'whole blarsted thing, don't you know, into his portmanteau' and tote it off—or buy up more ground here and enlarge the plant so that the company's grandchildren will call this place home."
I turned away, feeling very indifferent. Oldburgh's problem was small compared with that letter in my hand-bag.
"And he won't tell?" I asked, crossing over to my own desk and fitting the key in a slipshod fashion.
"He seems to think that silence is the divine right of corporations. Nobody has been able to get a word out of him—nor even to see him."
"Then—they don't know whether he's a human being or a Cockney?"
He leaned across toward me, his elbow flattening two tiers of keys on his machine.
"Say,