The official photograph was still in her hand when Mr. William K. Harvey, of the _Chicago Bulletin_, was announced. He was a very young man to be managing the London office of a great newspaper, but this was not a disadvantage for May Margaret's purpose.
"So you want to go to the front," he said, settling down into the arm-chair on the other side of the fire. "It would certainly make a great story. We ought to be able to syndicate it all through the Middle West; but you'll have to give up the idea of the British front. We might manage the French front, I think."
"But I want particularly to go to Arras. Surely, you can manage it, Mr. Harvey. You must know all sorts of influential people here." Her voice, with its husky contralto notes, rather like those of a boy whose voice has lately broken, had always an appeal for Mr. Harvey, and it was particularly pleasing just then. He beamed through his glasses and ran his hand through his curly hair.
"I was talking to Sir William Robertson about a very similar proposition only yesterday, and Sir William told me that he'd do anything on earth for the _Chicago Bulletin_, but the War Office, which is in heaven, had decided finally to allow no women correspondents at the British front."
May Margaret rose and went to the window. For a moment she pressed her brow against the cool glass and, as she stared hopelessly at the busses rumbling by, an idea came to her. She wondered that she had not thought of it before.
"Come here, Mr. Harvey," she said. "I want to show you something."
He joined her at the window. A bus had halted by the opposite pavement. The conductor was swinging lightly down by the hand-rail, a very youthful looking conductor, in breeches and leggings.
"Is that a man or a woman?" said May Margaret.
"And that?" She pointed to another figure striding by in blue overalls and a slouch hat.
"I don't know. There are so many of them about now, that on general principles, I guess it's a woman. Besides, it looks as if it would be in the army if it were not a woman."
"Yes, but I am an American correspondent," said May Margaret.
"Gee!" said Mr. Harvey, surveying her from head to foot. His face looked as if all the printing presses of the _Chicago Bulletin_ were silently at work behind it. She was tall and lean--a college friend had described her exactly as "half goddess and half gawk." Her face was of the open-air type. Her hair would have to be cropped, of course. "Gee!" he said again. "It would be the biggest scoop of the war."
