SHE had a patron, and in that way advanced in the business exactly like any man. After an apprenticeship in North Carolina, she went to New York for a news-magazine and then to Africa and the Middle East for a wire service. She remained very fond of her patron, an old-fashioned editor who'd refused to obey tradition and assign her to women's news. He understood from the beginning that she had not gone into journalism to describe women's clubs or marriages or charity balls, She was attractive and serious and somewhat shy, and the editor was not certain that she belonged in journalism at all. He thought, mistakenly, that she was fragile. But he trained her well in North Carolina and then recommended her to the newsmagazine,

She had wanted to be an historian and in the beginning entered journalism only to learn how things worked: impatient with theory, she was eager to learn the ethics of the street. To her surprise, she liked the milieu, its confusion and haste and chagrin and the instant obsolescence of yesterday's dispatch. After North Carolina and New York, she knew she would have to go abroad because she wanted to cover politics and war, and she wanted to see at firsthand the countries she knew only from books. In Africa and the Middle East, there were countless opportunities to witness politics and war, disorder and suffering, and no opportunity was ever missed. In time she became senior correspondent for the region, always traveling and often in danger. Her seriousness deepened, but her experiences did not make her either gallant or cynical as they often did her male colleagues. She did not care for cynicism as an attitude and had no need for the protection it gave. She was determined to stay afraid and grinning.