She caught an outbound car, and ere she descended from it she had conned the conversation over and over again.  “But how?” she repeated to herself, as she climbed the three flights of stairs to the rooms where she and her sister “bach’ed.”  “But how?” And so she continued to put the interrogation, for the stubborn Scotch blood, though many times removed from Scottish soil, was still strong in her.  And, further, there was need that she should learn how.  Her sister Letty and she had come up from an interior town to the city to make their way in the world.  John Wyman was land-poor.  Disastrous business enterprises had burdened his acres and forced his two girls, Edna and Letty, into doing something for themselves.  A year of school-teaching and of night-study of shorthand and typewriting had capitalized their city project and fitted them for the venture, which same venture was turning out anything but successful.  The city seemed crowded with inexperienced stenographers and typewriters, and they had nothing but their own inexperience to offer.  Edna’s secret ambition had been journalism; but she had planned a clerical position first, so that she might have time and space in which to determine where and on what line of journalism she would embark.  But the clerical position had not been forthcoming, either for Letty or her, and day by day their little hoard dwindled, though the room rent remained normal and the stove consumed coal with undiminished voracity.  And it was a slim little hoard by now.

“There’s Max Irwin,” Letty said, talking it over.  “He’s a journalist with a national reputation.  Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be able to tell you how.”

“But I don’t know him,” Edna objected.

“No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day.”

“Y-e-s,” (long and judicially), “but that’s different.”

“Not a bit different from the strange men and women you’ll interview when you’ve learned how,” Letty encouraged.

“I hadn’t looked at it in that light,” Edna conceded.  “After all, where’s the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself?  It will be practice, too.  I’ll go and look him up in the directory.”

“Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance,” she announced decisively a moment later.  “I just feel that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean.”

And Letty knew and nodded.  “I wonder what he is like?” she asked softly.

“I’ll make it my business to find out,” Edna assured her; “and I’ll let you know inside forty-eight hours.”

Letty clapped her hands.  “Good!  That’s the newspaper spirit!  Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!”

* * *

“—­and I am very sorry to trouble you,” she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist.