"Know them! If camping on
their doorsteps, and haunting the office buildings, and cajoling,
and fighting with secretaries and office boys, and assistants and
things constitutes knowing them, then we're chums."
"What makes you think you can write?" sneered the thin man.
Mary Louise gathered up her brush, and comb, and towel, and
parsley, and jumped off the soap box. She pointed belligerently at
her tormentor with the hand that held the brush.
"Being the scrub-lady's stalwart son, you wouldn't understand.
But I can write. I sha'n't go under. I'm going to make this town
count me in as the four million and oneth. Sometimes I get so
tired of being nobody at all, with not even enough cleverness in me
to wrest a living from this big city, that I long to stand out at
the edge of the curbing, and take off my hat, and wave it, and
shout, `Say, you four million uncaring people, I'm Mary Louise
Moss, from Escanaba, Michigan, and I like your town, and I want to
stay here. Won't you please pay some slight attention to me. No
one knows I'm here except myself, and the rent collector.'"
"And I," put in the rude young man.
"O, you," sneered Mary Louise, equally rude, "you don't
count."
The collarless young man in the shabby slippers smiled a
curious little twisted smile.
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