Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/118

 eighteen pages from the beginning, twenty-two pages from the end, and rewrite the middle. If only she'd begin and end her stories in the middle it would be the salvation of us both!" Unfortunately this admirable suggestion never reached the ears of the woman reporter who read her mutilated article the next morning and deplored, as usual, the lack of that local color which she was certain would have won the copy-reader's admiration and stopped his blue pencil in its impetuous descent. She propped her soft chin in the palms of her incompetent little hands and looked down at Miss Herrick rather doubtfully as she resumed her confidences.

"I sometimes think," she said wistfully, "that it's because I have n't had experience enough—I mean, I have n't lived enough and seen enough. The other newspaper women I know seem to have such dramatic lives. Interesting things are always happening to them. Nothing ever happens to me. I get little, unimportant assignments that don't count, though they make me work hard enough—and when I have finished I