The following morning, however, Mabel was once more filled with her usual self-esteem. Before going to sleep she had written a poem which would have sounded more original if it had not been so very like several well-known bits of verse she had often read. But to Mabel it seemed to spring from her soul, and after reading it with tears of appreciation in her eyes, she decided to let the Times-Leader have the privilege of printing it.

That was to be a strange, terrible and eventful Monday. The Day of Overheard Conversations Mabel might have named it.

There was nothing to warn her of the day's disagreeable outcome. It was one of Louisville's loveliest mornings, and there was enough left from her Sunday dinner to give her a good breakfast. She was up early enough to go over her lessons, and the apartment as she left it after Sunday's violent cleaning had a look of righteous order and dustlessness. Also, having read the poem a number of times, Mabel saw herself as the coming poetess and preened herself accordingly.

One of the nicest girls in high school overtook Mabel and they walked to school together. It was in the cloak-room that Mabel received her first stab. The other stepped around the end of a cloak rack where she was met by a third girl whom Mabel knew but slightly.

"Hello, Grace," she heard her say. "I stopped at your house but you had gone."

"Yes, I walked to school with Mabel Brewster," replied Grace.

"Well, how you can stand her I don't know," said the other girl with a sniff. "Of all the stupid prigs she is the worst!"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," said Grace gently.

"Well, I would!" declared the other girl stubbornly. "She thinks she is a wonder and knows everything, when in fact she is stupid and conceited, and no one likes her."

Grace was a Girl Scout and this talk shocked her. She shook her head. "I don't think you are really right, Mary, and besides I don't think you ought to speak so."

"It is true, just the same," said the girl stubbornly. "You know yourself what her marks are—just as low as she can stand and pass. And that way she has of smiling in such a superior way when anyone else misses. And when she misses she always has such a good excuse! I do wonder why the teachers stand for it!"

A group of laughing and chattering girls came into the cloak-room and Mabel seized the opportunity to slip into the hall and into the class-room. Her face burned. Of course she told herself that the girl was jealous, but Mabel was one of those persons who require the approval and admiration of those about her in order to be happy.

She did such poor work that morning that she was obliged to stay after school, although she knew that she ought to be at the office. She took her books to a desk in the reference library where she was soon lost in her work.

Presently she heard the low voices of a couple of teachers. They came and seated themselves on the other side of a big blackboard just behind Mabel.

"Oh, dear," sighed one of them, "this weather makes me long for vacation."

"The last weeks of school are always a drag," answered the other. "And I think the children feel it as much as we teachers. Even my brightest pupils are letting down, and the marks have all fallen off."

"Even Mabel Brewster's marks?" queried Miss Jones with a sniff.

"What a goose that girl is!" said Miss Hannibal. "I don't know what does ail her."

"An inflated ego," said Miss Jones.

"Novels and the New Woman Movement, I think," said Miss Hannibal. "It is a perfect shame. I feel so sorry for her mother. Here this girl, as soon as she gets where she would naturally be of some service and comfort to her mother, steps gaily out of all her responsibilities and home duties and sets up a home of her own and goes around talking about a career. Career, indeed! Why, the child has nothing to career on! She did not inherit her mother's cleverness. If she was my child, I would send her to her room and keep her there on bread and water until she came to her senses."

"So would I," said Miss Jones, "but it is really none of our business, of course."

"Well, in a way it is," answered Miss Hannibal testily. "You see she is doing very poor school work, and the Principal told me yesterday that he would probably have to drop her from her class at the end of the school year. And she won't work, because she is so crazy over that silly newspaper job that she simply neglects everything else. I just don't see what ails her mother!"

"Does her mother know what poor work she is doing in school?" asked Miss Jones.

"I don't know," said Miss Hannibal. "And I don't know what good it would do if she did. A girl who thinks as little of her mother as Mabel does would not care what she thought and would not listen to her advice. You may be sure that she has cost her mother many bitter tears already. I shan't worry about her. She spoils my thoughts. I have wanted to ask you how the Morrisson boys are doing."

Miss Jones proceeded to enthuse over the Morrissons, but for once their achievements did not interest Mabel at all. She was stunned and angry. Yet as she sat huddled motionless in her corner, waiting for the teachers to go, she soon recovered her balance, and reflected that they too were probably jealous. She thought fondly of her position on the newspaper and proudly dreamed her dream of the day when she would drift into the magic circle of the Chief Editor's desk as his best reporter.

When Miss Hannibal and Miss Jones sauntered away, Mabel lost no time in making good her own escape. She crossed over to Third Street where the beautiful houses with their look of reserve and wealth always catered to her love of luxury. Ahead were three girls in Girl Scout uniforms. She recognized them at once: Rosanna Horton with her black docked hair, Claire Maslin's long swinging red braid and Elise Hargrave's bobbing curls. At first Mabel decided to walk slowly and avoid them but she changed her mind and caught up with them.

"Do you still like the work you are doing?" asked Claire in her soft drawl.

"I suppose so," said Mabel, and then as though forced into honesty, she added, "The trouble is, I miss mother and Frank so that I don't seem to do all the work I planned after all. It doesn't seem to be working out right. Of course I shall go on with it, because I really owe it to myself, but it isn't half the fun I thought it was going to be."

"I knew it," said Elise Hargrave gently. "It is a most dreadful thing to be torn from the home nest, and when one hops out by one's self and waves that not so strong wing one must of a necessity wish to be back."

"Why don't you give up and go home?" said Rosanna. "You would be doing the wise thing."

"No, I can't," said Mabel. "I suppose some day when I am famous, I will perhaps take mother and Frank to live with me." She laughed and nodded as she left the girls and hurried on to the Times-Leader office.

"She means it; she actually means it!" said Rosanna in a hushed voice.

"Of course she means it!" laughed Claire. "Isn't she funny? I never saw a girl so conceited in my life. And really she isn't bright at all. She is just an ordinary girl with ordinary gifts. I think she is usually quite stupid when she talks, but perhaps that is because she is so awfully conceited that it bores you."

"I hate to hear you say such things about her," said the tender-hearted Rosanna.

When Mabel reached the office she went directly to the big shabby dictionary open on its stand, and looked up two words, Inflated, and ego. The result was not pleasing! She sat before the book, glooming over the unflattering result of her quest. So she had an "inflated ego," had she? As she sat there, the office boy, seeing her close to his letter-press and feeling himself capable of starting an acquaintance with any girl his own size, pulled his purple and gold necktie into place, seized a few sheets of paper, and sauntered up. Mabel continued to stare at the open page of the dictionary.

"Kiddin' me," thought the boy to himself. He put the papers in place, and commenced to whistle, one careful eye on Mabel. He whistled so far off the key that she looked up. Instantly he grinned.

"Great job, this!" he said cheerfully, twisting the lever with a vast show of effort. "I bet I work harder than any fellow in this office. I bet I work harder than the Chief himself." Mabel continued to look at him, but did not speak, and he continued, "Your name is Brewster; Mabel Brewster, isn't it? I saw it on some of the papers Miss Gere and the Chief threw in the waste basket. Say, what do you write such gobs of stuff for? They don't use it. Aren't you on to that yet? My name's Jesse Hart. Ain't that a peach of a name to give a fellow? Sounds like a sure-nuff girl's name—Jesse. And Hart means a deer. Fellows used to call me Jessie dear when I was a kid, but I knocked a couple of 'em out and they quit it." He grinned at Mabel more cheerfully than before. "Say, you don't wear yourself out talkin', do you, sis?"

Mabel flushed with anger. A couple of the reporters saw the two and smiled playfully. "Jessie dear" winked back and Mabel flushed.

"I don't want to talk to you," she said distinctly. "I wish you would go away."

"Suits me!" said Jesse. "Suits me all right, Miss High-Mighty." He gave a short laugh with a close imitation of the manner of Dalton Duplex, his movie star villain, and strutted off. Mabel noted that the rims of his ears were very red. She dismissed him angrily from her thoughts and went over to Miss Gere's desk.

The thin man pounded furiously on the next typewriter as usual, but he looked up as she passed him. "A new crush, Miss Mabel?" he asked mischievously.

Mabel was too angry to answer; she rudely flounced into the chair and turned her burning face away.

Surely, she thought, there never was another girl who had so many things to annoy her. That silly boy! As though she would bother to look at him. The two immaculate Morrissons flashed through her mind. Such boys and their friends were well worth while. Then her mind turned to the remark about the waste basket. She wondered if her work was being thrown away. She knew that it was always rewritten, but she thought that was the rule of the office. Mabel had a lot to think of.

The next morning Jesse proceeded to prove that he was a youth of grit and determination. He wore another necktie, and when he saw Mabel sitting at Miss Gere's desk he went over and grinned a cheerful good-morning. Mabel returned it glumly with a stony stare that would have quelled a less determined boy.

"Say, how about a picnic Sunday afternoon?" he asked without noting the drop in temperature. "I thought we could ask your mother to chaperone us, and get your brother Frank, and a couple of other fellows and have supper at Jacobs' park. The chaps have a car and they know two dandy girls."

"No," said Mabel decidedly. "It isn't possible for me to go. I am sure mother wouldn't go, nor Frank." She spoke so sneeringly that Jesse flushed.

"That's where you guess again, Miss Highty-Mighty!" he said. "I saw Frank last night and he asked his mother, and she said sure, so I guess I just get another girl for little me, and you needn't think I don't know where to get off. I won't trouble you again, so don't you worry." He stalked off, leaving Mabel furious to think that Frank and her mother were going to go with that dreadful boy and his dreadful friends. She could just see the sort they must be: the girls like a lot of the girls she knew in high school, giggly, silly, gum-chewing girls, with untidy ruffed-up hair pulled over their ears, and boys like Jesse. She sent a cautious glance after Jesse. After all there was nothing really the matter with him, except she just didn't like his neckties, and oh well, he wasn't a bit like the Morrissons, for instance, who always looked as though they had come out of a bandbox, and were so polite, and such fun.

That night going home. Mabel met Frank. He seemed to be always hanging around the corner nearest the Times-Leader office when she came out at night and always walked home with her.

"Jesse says you won't go on our picnic," Frank commenced at once.

"Why, of course not!" said Mabel. "I am perfectly surprised to think that you and mother would mix with such people!"

"Such people?" repeated Frank. "What people?"

"Why, the sort that Jesse boy must go around with. Of course I know how mother is. She would chaperone anyone who wanted her, but I should think you would know enough to keep her out of it."

"Well, I don't see how you figure it," said Frank sulkily. "I am going to take Helen Culver. She is all right, isn't she? And Jesse was going to take you, and I bet you think you are all right, and Rosanna Horton and that Maslin girl are going with Jesse's cousins. Pretty good crowd, I take it."

"Who are his cousins, for mercy sake?" demanded Mabel.

"Don't you know?" asked Frank. "The Morrissons, of course! You know their father owns the Times-Leader."