p from her, thanked her, bowed gravely, and turned to go.
A question had risen involuntarily to the tip of her tongue; it hung
there for a breath, its fate in the balance; and then she released it,
casually, when another second would have been too late.

"How is your work on the _Post_ going?"

He wheeled as though she had struck him, and looked at her with a sudden
odd hardening of the lower part of his face.

"The _Post_ discharged me this morning."

"Oh--"

It was all that she could say, for she knew it very well. She had had it
from Colonel Cowles two days before it happened, which was three days
after the April meeting of the directors. Charles Gardiner West, who was
to have raised his voice in behalf of Mr. Queed on that occasion,
happened not to be present at all. Having effected the dissolution of
Semple and West, he had gone to the country for a month's rest, in
preparation for that mapping out of collegiate plans which was to
precede his tour of Europe. Hence the directors, hearing no protests
from intercessors, unanimously bestowed discretion upon the Colonel to
replace the transcendental scientist with a juicier assistant at a
larger salary.

"At least," the young man qualified, with a curious mixture of
aggressiveness and intense mortification, "the _Post_ will discharge me
on the 15th day of May unless I show marked improvement. I believe that
improvement was exactly the word the estimable Colonel employed."

"I'm awfully sorry," said Sharlee--"awfully! But after all, you want
only some routine hack-work--any routine hack-work--to establish a
little income. It will not be very hard to find something else, as good
or even better."

"You do not appear to grasp the fact that, apart from any considerations
of that sort, this is an unpleasant, a most offensive thing to have
happen--"

"Oh, but that is just what it isn't, Mr. Queed," said Sharlee, who quite
failed to appreciate his morbid tenderness for even the least of his
intellectual offspring. "You have taken no pride in the newspaper work;
you look down on it as altogether beneath you. You cannot mind this in
any personal way--"

"I mind it," said he, "like the devil."

The word fell comically from his lips, but Sharlee, leaning against the
shut door, looked at him with grave sympathy in her eyes.

"Mr. Queed, if you had tried to write nursery rhymes and--failed, would
you have taken it to heart?"

"Never mind arguing it. In fact, I don't