The Bourbon news. [volume] (Paris, Ky.) 1895-19??, 1907-09-24
Melinda's
knight.
-. By CECILY ALLEN.
Copyrighted, 1907, by c. H. sutcliTe.

Before her arrival in the big, busting
! tity she had studied stenography aud
typewriting in an up state business
college. She was a good steDOgrapher,
TOO, and would have done well 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 a circulating IL
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
ed at the club only she had to send
her widowed mother some money
every week, and the working girls
club was a stern necessity in the adj
justment of her finances Melinda was
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?
1t 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 aud
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 1t
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 20
consider that in a humble, twentieth
century fashion this was rather
knightly thing for an underpaid book
keeper to do, but she took the theate,
tickets gratefully and invited the as
SiStant matron at the home to accom-
pany her to the theater
Il was a wonderful play. called "The
Road TO Yesterday" and the natural
climax of, Melinda's course in novel
reading, for in it n 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. It's mOral-or one of
them-was that the old spirit of knight
hood lived in the twentieth century
man, though it sometimes had rather
practical way of manifesting itself
From that night, perhaps because %
the play and perhaps because dog
days set in, Melinda read fewer novels
and hunted methOdically for her TWEEN
tieth century knight. 1t was too hot
for her to light the gas in the small
hall room or even to burn a lamp.
and it 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
were all married. The junior partner
was engaged to girl who had mil
lions. clubfOOt and bad taste i'm
frOcks, so he held no knightly possibil-
tiles. To be sure, there was the boy
who ran the elevator after p. IN. He
always held the car when he saw Me-
linda coming on those nights on which
she worked overtime. But he was
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. heliotrOpe, phlox and
ragged robins, that his mother raised
| IN the garden of their suburban home.
Melinda found them on her desk in
milk bottle without a card. A real
knight, of course. would have card
or leave a glove or something of the
sort
Her search for knight was tagging,
partly because Of the heat and partly
! because the hot, Overworked men
around her looked anything but knight
| ~ in midsummer. when the assistant
| matrOn, remembering the theater tick