Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/187

 to see you girls very often, in the years to come."

She laughed a little nervously. "I hardly know how to start my story," she said. "I feel as if I ought to say I was always a strange child, as the romantic heroines of fiction usually begin. I was not an especially strange child, but my father was and is a strange man. You all know of him."

She mentioned the name of a man famous throughout the country as one of the West's great mining kings. His eccentricities of character were as conspicuous and as much discussed as his vast wealth. The newspaper women recalled the printed stories of his princely home, his beautiful wife, his munificent gifts to various public enterprises, and, above all, his odd theories and experiments. Despite his wealth, he had socialistic leanings, and was idolized by his miners, they knew. And this was his daughter,—this quietly attired young woman who had worked side by side with them for six months in the relentless grind of journalism. "When I left college," continued that