Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/117



HE trouble with my writing," said Mrs. Ogilvie, pensively, "is that it lacks local color."

She was leaning on Miss Herrick's desk in the city room, reading with much self-control a story of her own which had appeared in "The Searchlight" that morning. Not more than half of it had survived the ruthless blue pencil of Hunt, the copy-reader, whose muttered words as he had toiled over it the night before had not been prayers. In the interval between the rewriting of the last paragraph and the "building" of the "head" for the article, that gentleman had refreshed himself by confiding to a fellow-sufferer at the next desk a frank opinion of Mrs. Ogilvie's work which would have been of the greatest value to her if she had over heard it. "All I have to do with it," he ended grimly as he lit a cigarette, "is to cut out