Waterbury evening Democrat., 1907-09-20
Melinda's Knight.
.... By cEcILY ALLEN.
Copyrighted, 1907, by c. H. Sutcliffe.

Before her arrival in the big, bustling
 city she had studied tAnography aud 1 typewriting in an up state business college. She was good stenographer,
 too, and would have done we'll in the city-if she had stuck to stenographic pot hooks and curlycues.
 But Melinda would read novels, and when she had secured a position and settled herself in a hall room at the working girls club the novel habit re- asserted itself more strongly than ever,
 this perhaps because there was a sec
 ondhand bookstore just around the corner, where she could buy novels for 10 cents and exchange them for
 different ones by paying just ? cents
 more. In fact, it was circulating H. | brary system that made Melinda feel particularly elegant and independent
 and saved her a triweekly trip to the city library, mile away.
 Melinda did not care much for the
 girls she met at the working girls club. They talked shop and shirt
 waists, and most of them worked in factories at less salary than Melinda
 received. She would not have remain
 cd at the club only she had to send
 her widowed mother some money
 every week, and the working girls
 club was stern necessity in the ad-
 justment of her finances Melinda was
 also little bored with conversation
 about shirt waists, because she had to make the ones she had brought from home do her all season. So what was the use of discussing bargain counter styles in blouses?
 It was much more fun to read nov
 els, particularly the sort of novels
 most common at the secondhand book
 shop, stories of English working lassies
 and chivalrous lords and dukes, who
 abandoned scented drawing rooms and
 red coated hunting fields to besiege
 the hearts of the aforementioned honest
 working lassies.
 Just about the time that Melinda had
 absorbed her three hundred and forty
 ninth novel the bookkeeper gave her a
 couple of passes for the theater. It
 was just his luck. he explained, that
 the baby had the whooping cough
 when those passes came his way, but
 of course he wouldn't leave his wife
 alone of an evening under such cir
 cumstances. Melinda did not stop to
 consider that in humble, twentieth
 century fashion this was rather a
 knightly thing for an underpaid book keeper to do, but she took the theater
 tickets gratefully and invited the as- sistant matron at the home to accom-
 pany her to the theater.
 It was wonderful play, called "The
 Road to Yesterday" and the natural climax of Melinda's course in novel reading, for in it a young girl and her lover and many other folk were trans ported back 200 years and did all the things of which one reads in novels centuries old. Its moral-or one of them-was that the old spirit of knight hood lived in the twentieth century man, though it sometimes had rather a practical way of manifesting itself.
 From that night, perhaps because oe the play and perhaps because dog days set in, Melinda read fewer novels and hunted methodically for her twen- tieth century knight. It was too hot for her to light the gas in the small hall room or even to burn lamp. and 1t was just right to sit on the stoop and watch passing figures that might suddenly blossom out as knights. So many of the figures slouched or stopped that Melinda got bit discorr- aged and began to look for them by daylight-in the big office building where she worked.
 But things had been going badly on the market. and most of the men who | held possibilities of knighthood hur. ried past her with quick, nervous strides. lowered heads and deep ringed | eyes. Her fellow workers in the office l were all married. The junior partner | was engaged 10 girl who had mil i lions, clubfoot and bad taste in i frocks, so he held no knightly possibll- l ities. To be sure. there was the boy l who ran the elevator after ?. m. He ] always held the car whtu he saw Me linda coming on those nights on which I she worked overtime. But he was i scarcely over five feet three, his | cheeks were a bucolical pink in hue. and his nose was freckled. Besides, he was paid to hold elevators and be obliging to tenants who worked over time, and mere knighthood on salary was not worth mentioning.
 Once or twice he had brought her some garden flowers. the old fashioned kind, mignonette. heIiotrope. phlox and ragged robins, that his mother raised in the garden of their suburban home. Melinda found them on her desk in a milk bottle without a card. A real knight, of course, would have a card or leave a glove or something of the sort.
 Her search for a knight was tagging. partly because of the heat and partly because the hot. overworked men around her looked anything but knight y in midsummer. when the assistant remembering the theater tick ets, asked Melinda to make a trip Town the bay and back One merciless- ' hot night. Melinda assented lam yuidly, and the assistant matron felt Ter heart stirred by a strange pity for his tired little up state girl, who sometimes, amid all the srtifciality md sordidness of her city life. man. Iged to hold on to her old ideals. She gas so different from the other in- mates of the club-a bit silly about