The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1907-08-16
THE EVENING STORY
MeIinda's Knight.
(By Cecily Allen.)

Before her arrival in the big bustIipe
city she had studied stenography and
typewriting in an upstate business
coliege- She was good stenographer,
LOO, ana would have done well in the
elty-lf she had stuck to stenographic
pot hooks and curlycues
But Melinda would read novels. And
WHen she mad secured a position and
settled herself in ballroom at the
working girls club, the novel habit re-
asserted Itself more strongly than ever.
rms, perhaps because there was sec
ond hand bookstore Just around the
corner, where she could buy novels for
10 cents and exchange them for diff
1erent ones by paying just two cents
more. In TACT, 1t was circulating. IL
prary system that made Melinda reel
particularly elegant and Independent
and saved her tri-weekly 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 remained
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 adjustment OF
her finances. Melinda was also III
tie bored with conversation about
shirt waists, because she had to make
the ones she had brought from nome
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 las
sizes and chiValrous lords and dukes
who abandoned scented drawing
rooms and relocated hunting fields
to besiege the hearts of the fore-men-
toned honest working lassies.
Just about the time that Melinda
had absorbed her three hundred and
forty-ninth novel, the bookkeeper
gave her couple of passes for the
theater. 1t was 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
Melinda did not stop to
consider that in an humble, twentieth
century fashion this was rather
knightly thing for an underpaid book
keeper to do, but she took the theater
gratefully and invited the as
sistant matron at the home to- accom-
pany her to the theater.
1t was a wonderful play, called 1.-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
back two hundred years
and did all the things of which one
reads in novels centuries old. It's
one of them-was that the
old spirit of knighthood lived in the
twentieth century man, though 1t
som etimes had rather a practical way
of manifesting itself.
From that night, perhaps because
of the play and perhaps because dog
days set in, Melinda read less novels
and hunted methodically for her TWEEN
tieth century knight. 1t was too hot
for her to light the gas in the hall
room, or even to burn a lamp, and 1t
was just right to sit on the stooP and
watch passing figures that might sud-
denly blossom out as knights. So many
of the figures slouched or stopped that
Melinda got a bit discouraged and be- |
gan to look for them by daylight-in |
the big office building where she
worked.
But things had been going badly on |
held possibilities of knighthood hur- |
ried past her with quick, nervous |
strides, lowered heads and deep-ringed |
eyes. Her fellowworkers in the office |
were all married. The junior partner
was engaged to girl who had mill |
ions. a clubfoot and bad taste in |
frocks, so he held no knightly posi- |
bilities. To be sure, there was the boy |
who ran the elevator after p. m. |
He always held the car when he saw |
which she worked overtime. But he |
was scarcely over five foot three, his |
IN eeks 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 i
some garden flowers, the old-fashion-
I'd kind, mignonette, heliotrope. phlox |
raised in the garden OF their subur- |
pan home. Melinda found them on |
1er desk In a milk bottle without |
,ard. A real knight, Of course, would /
nave a card, or leave a glove or some
hing of the sort.
Her search for a knight was lag
ying partly because Of the heat and |
partly because the hot, overworked /
men around her looked anything but |
in midsummer, when the
heater tickets, asked Melinda to
make a trip down the bay and back |
,ne mercilessly hot night. Melinda
lssented languidly, and the assistant
strange pity for this tired little up
,tate girl, who. somehow, amid all
he artificiaiity and sordidness OF her
.ity life, managed to hold on to her
I'D ideals. She was SO different from
he other inmates of the CLUB bit |
lilly about novels and music and flow
RS but still SO shy and sweet.
1t was a great night on the bay,
noonlit and sparkling, after a day Of
elentless heat and humidity, and not
night for disaster at all. But one
'vertook them, fiery sheet of flame
reside which the suns ray of the day
ust closed were merciful Melinda /
leard just one long, hoarse cry, saw
me great flash of light, felt an arm
ERIK her to her feet and then every
hing was blank This may have been
because the day had been SO long and
lard, or because the girl had never
n all her reading days thought of
What she ought to do when fire broke
ut on a crowded boat.
Something cool and lovely was u