_Concerning a Plan to make a Small Gift to a Fellow-Boarder, and
what it led to in the Way of Calls; also touching upon Mr. Queed's
Dismissal from the Post, and the Generous Resolve of the Young
Lady, Charles Weyland._
The State Department of Charities was a rudimentary affair in those
days, just as Queed had said. Its appropriation was impossibly meager,
even with the niggard's increase just wrung from the legislature. The
whole Department fitted cozily into a single room in the Capitol; it was
small as a South American army, this Department, consisting, indeed, of
but the two generals. But the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary
worked together like a team of horses. They had already done wonders,
and their hopes were high with still more wonders to perform. In
especial there was the reformatory. The legislature had adjourned
without paying any attention to the reformatory, exactly as it had been
meant to do. But a bill had been introduced, at all events, and the
_Post_ had carried a second editorial, expounding and urging the plan;
several papers in the smaller cities of the State had followed the
_Post's_ lead; and thus the issue had been fairly launched, with the
ground well broken for a successful campaign two years later.
The office of the Department was a ship-shape place, with its two desks,
a big one and a little one; the typewriter table; the rows and rows of
letter-files on shelves; a sectional bookcase containing Charities
reports from other States, with two shelves reserved for authoritative
books by such writers as Willoughby, Smathers, and Conant. Here,
doubtless, would some day stand the colossal work of Queed. At the big
desk sat the Rev. Mr. Dayne, a practical idealist of no common sort, a
kind-faced man with a crisp brown mustache. At the typewriter-table sat
Sharlee Weyland, writing firm letters to thirty-one county almshouse
keepers. It was hard upon noon. Sharlee looked tired and sad about the
eyes. She had not been to supper at Mrs. Paynter's for months, but she
went there nearly every afternoon from the office to see Fifi, who had
been in bed for four weeks.
The Department door opened, with no premonitory knock, and in walked, of
all people, Mr. Queed.
Sharlee came forward very cordially to greet the visitor, and at once
presented him to the Secretary. However Queed dismissed Mr. Dayne very
easily, and gazing at Sharlee sharply through his spectacles, said:
"I should like to speak to you in private a moment."
"Certainly," said Sharlee.
"I'll step into the hall," said kind-faced Mr. Dayne.
"No, no. Indeed you mustn't. We will."
Sharlee faced the young man in the sunlit hail with sympathetic
expectancy and some curiosity in her eyes.
"There is," he began without preliminaries, "a girl at the house where I
board, who has been confined to her bed with sickness for some weeks. It
appears that she has grown thin and weak, so that they will not permit
her to graduate at her school. This involves a considerable
disappointment to her."
"You are speaking of Fifi," said Sharlee, gently.
"That is the girl's name, if it is of any interest to you--"
"You know she is my first cousin."
"Possibly so," he replied, as though to say that no one had the smallest
right to hold him responsible for that. "In this connection, a small
point has arisen upon which advice is required, the advice of a woman.
You happen to be the only other girl I know. This," said Queed, "is why
I have called."