description copied for me
yet? Heh? Gawd! you're slow. Got a cigarette?" He went off, puffing out
cigarette smoke, shaking his head and audibly muttering, "Slow bunch,
werry." He seemed to be of Una's own age, or perhaps a year older--a
slender young man with horn-rimmed eye-glasses, curly black hair, and a
trickle of black mustache. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbow, and
Una had a secret, shamed, shivering thrill in the contrast of the
dead-white skin of his thin forearms with the long, thick, soft, black
hairs matted over them. They seemed at once feminine and acidly male.

"Crazy idiot," she observed, apparently describing herself and the
nervous young man together. But she knew that she wanted to see him
again.

She discovered that he was prone to such violent appearances; that his
name was Walter Babson; that he was one of the three desk editors under
the managing editor; that the stenographers and office-boys alternately
disapproved of him, because he went on sprees and borrowed money from
anybody in sight, and adored him because he was democratically frank
with them. He was at once a hero, clown, prodigal son, and preacher of
honesty. It was variously said that he was a socialist, an anarchist,
and a believer in an American monarchy, which he was reported as
declaring would "give some color to this flat-faced province of a
country." It was related that he had been "fresh" even to the owner, and
had escaped discharge only by being the quickest worker in the office,
the best handy man at turning motor statistics into lively news-stories.
Una saw that he liked to stand about, bawling to the quizzical S.
Herbert Ross that "this is a hell of a shop to work in--rotten pay and
no _esprit de corps_. I'd quit and free-lance if I could break in with
fiction, but a rotten bunch of log-rollers have got the inside track
with all the magazines and book-publishers."

"Ever try to write any fiction?" Una once heard S. Herbert retort.

"No, but Lord! any fool could write better stuff than they publish. It's
all a freeze-out game; editors just accept stuff by their friends."

In one week Una heard Walter Babson make approximately the same
assertions to three different men, and to whoever in the open office
might care to listen and profit thereby. Then, apparently, he ceased to
hear the call of literature, and he snorted at S. Herbert Ross's stodgy
assistant that he was a wage-slave, and a fool not to form a clerks'
unio