artless question, and just
when everything was beginning to go so nicely too. In about half an
hour, when she got up to retire, she said timidly:--

"I'm sorry if I--I was rude just now, Mr. Queed. Indeed, I didn't mean
to be...."

"I did not say that you were rude," he answered without looking up.

But at the door Fifi was arrested by his voice.

"Why do you think it to your advantage to work in here?"

"It's--it's a good deal warmer, you know," said Fifi, flustered,
"and--then of course there's the table and lamp. But it's quite all
right upstairs--really!"

He made no answer.

VI

_Autobiographical Data imparted, for Sound Business Reasons, to a
Landlady's Agent; of the Agent's Other Title, etc._

While all move in slots in this world, Mr. Queed's slot was infinitely
more clearly marked than any of his neighbors'. It ran exclusively
between the heaven of his room and the hades of the _Post_ office;
manifesting itself at the latter place in certain staid writings done in
exchange for ten dollars, currency of the realm, paid down each and
every Saturday. Into this slot he had been lifted, as it were by the
ears, by a slip of a girl of the name of Charlotte Lee Weyland, though
it was some time before he ever thought of it in that way.

In the freemasonry of the boarding-house, the young man was early
accepted as he was. He was promptly voted the driest, most uninteresting
and self-absorbed savant ever seen. Even Miss Miller, ordinarily
indefatigable where gentlemen were concerned, soon gave him up. To Mr.
Bylash she spoke contemptuously of him, but secretly she was awed by his
stately manner of speech and his godlike indifference to all pleasures,
including those of female society. Of them all, Nicolovius was the only
one who seemed in the least impressed by Mr. Queed's appointment as
editorial writer on the _Post_. With the others the exalted world he
moved in was so remote from theirs that no surprises were possible
there, and if informed that the little Doctor had been elected president
of Harvard University, it would have seemed all in the day's work to
William Klinker. Klinker was six feet high, red-faced and friendly, and
Queed preferred his conversation above any heard at Mrs. Paynter's
table. It reminded him very much of his friend the yeggman in New York.

What went on behind the door of the tiny Scriptorium the boarders could
only guess. It may be said that its owner's big griev