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open.
    Sally, with her hair carefully piled on top of her small head, was going over the filing cabinets with a feather duster.
    “What are you doing here?” demanded Mr. Barton crossly.
    “Don’t you remember?” said Sally sweetly, although her heart was hammering against her ribs. “You gave me Aunt Mabel’s job.”
    “I did?” Mr. Barton clutched his head. It had been a hectic evening, what with the old girl dying like that, and then putting the magazine to bed. He’d had a few more pints than were good for him, and so the evening before came back to him as a sort of gray fuzziness interspersed with bright flashes of total recall.
    He could remember the head printer laughing over the Aunt Mabel column and pronouncing it very good.
    He looked at Sally doubtfully. Had he offered her the job?
    She certainly looked less of a schoolgirl with her hair up. In fact, she looked very attractive indeed. Enough to make the Reverend Frobisher Entwhistle turn in his grave. The Reverend Entwhistle had founded the magazine some fifty years ago. The small profit from the journal went into a trust for his various dissolute offspring. Mr. Barton had held the job for the past twenty years. He had tried to storm Fleet Street as a young man with dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent burning in his eyes. But somehow he had become the editor of
Home Chats
instead. He had made no changes.
    Apart from Aunt Mabel, an office boy, and Mr. Barton, the rest of the contributors were free-lance, sending in articles on “How to Reprimand a Bad Servant,” “How to Raise Funds for Your Local Church,” “Parish Gossip,” and similar epistles.
    He himself wrote the cookery column, plagiarizing Mrs. Beeton without the smallest shred of conscience. He lived for the evenings, which he spent at the bar of the Red Lion around the corner, when, after the fifth pint, he could pretend he was a real Fleet Street man and hint darkly at scoops in far countries with all the other failures who were doing exactly the same thing.
    Suddenly the whole morning-after futility of his job hit him.
    “Very well,” he said to Sally. “But only a trial, mind. We only publish six letters and answers. But you have to reply personally to everything that comes in.”
    “Is there a lot of correspondence?” asked Sally anxiously, looking around the cluttered room.
    “No,” sighed Mr. Barton. “Aunt Mabel was too much of a Bible-basher to be popular. If you run short, make ’em up.”
    “Isn’t that dishonest?” asked Sally, round-eyed.
    Mr. Barton stared at her in disgust. “If you want to work in Fleet Street,” he said caustically, “you’d better learn the ropes. I am not asking you to report on wars that don’t exist or social scandals that never happened, although there’s plenty of those in the popular press. If you don’t have letters, write them yourself. That’s not selling your soul.”
    Sally nodded. He stared at her, and then he said, “And another thing—
don’t
, whatever you do, tell anyone you’re Aunt Mabel. You’re too young, see! We’ve got a drawing of this sweet little old lady with specs at the top of the column, and that’s what you’re supposed to look like.”
    “What are my wages?” asked Sally faintly.
    “Two pounds and fifteen shillings a week,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”
    “I’ll take it,” said Sally breathlessly. It seemed like an awful lot of money to her, and she had hardly made a dent in her fortune of two hundred pounds.
    Mr. Barton gave a weary flip of his hand and strode out.
    Sally slowly walked around the desk and sat down, hugging herself in excitement. She had made it! Here she was in Fleet Street, and an editor—well, Letters Editor—but still.
    Sally’s first flight into journalism didn’t exactly hit the streets. That was not the way of
Home Chats
. It rather
filtered
its way into domestic homes and vicarages, where it mostly lay ignored until the cook took it away to the