She went very well, but she was all the better for the severest kind of a bit.

So Miss Bell wrote about colonial exhibitions and popular spectacles, and country outings for babies of the slums, and longed for a fairer field.

As midsummer came on there arrived a dearth in these objects of orthodox interest, and Rattray told her she might submit "anything on the nail" that occurred to her, in addition to such work as the office could give her to do.

Then, in spite of the vigilance of the editor-in-chief, an odd unconventional bit of writing crept now and then into the _Age_--an interview with some eccentric notability with the piquancy of a page from Gyp, a bit of pathos picked out of the common, streets, a fragment of character-drawing which smiled visibly and talked audibly.
Elfrida in her garret drew a joy from these things.

She cut them out and read them over and over again, and put them sacredly away, with Nadie's letters and a manuscript poem of a certain Bruynotin's, and a scrawl from one Hakkoff, with a vigorous sketch of herself, from memory, in pen and ink in the corner of the page, in the little eastern-smelling wooden box which seemed to her to represent the core of her existence.