Freshness and unconventionality for the _Age_ was what Mr.Rattray sought as they seek the jewel in the serpent's head in the far East.

He talked to the editor-in-chief about it, mentioning the increasing lot of things concerning women that had to be touched, which only a woman could treat "from the inside," and the editor-in-chief agreed sulkily, because experience told him it was best to agree with Mr.Rattray, that Miss Bell should be taken on the staff on trial, at two pounds a week.

"But the paper doesn't want a female Zola," he growled; "you can tell her that." Rattray did not tell her precisely that, but he explained the situation so that she quite understood it, the next afternoon when he called to talk the matter over with her.

He could not ask her to come to the office to discuss it, he said, they were so full up, they had really no place to receive a lady.

And he apologized for his hat, which was not a silk one, in the uncertain way of a man who has heard of the proprieties in these things.