He frowned at her through glasses that looked as big and as round as
butter-saucers, with an expression in which impatience contended with
faint embarrassment.
"As her fellow-lodger," he resumed, precisely, "I have been in the habit
of assisting this girl with her studies and have thus come to take an
interest in her--a small interest. During her sickness, it seems, many
of the boarders have been in to call upon her. In a similar way, she has
sent me several messages inviting me to call, but I have not been in
position to accept any of these invitations. It does not follow that,
because I gave some of my time in the past to assisting her with her
lessons, I can afford to give more of it now for purposes of--of mere
sociability. I make the situation clear to you?"
Sharlee, to whom Fifi had long since made the situation clear, puckered
her brow like one carefully rehearsing the several facts. "Yes, I
believe that is all perfectly clear, Mr. Queed."
He hesitated visibly; then his lips tightened and, gazing at her with a
touch of something like defiance, he said: "On the other hand, I do not
wish this girl to think that I bear her ill-will for the time I have
given her in the past. I--ahem--have therefore concluded to make her a
present, a small gift."
Sharlee stood looking at him without a reply.
"Well?" said he, annoyed. "I am not certain what form this small gift
had best take."
She turned away from him and walked to the end of the hall, where the
window was. To Queed's great perplexity, she stood there looking out for
some time, her back toward him. Soon it came into his mind that she
meant to indicate that their interview was over, and this attitude
seemed extremely strange to him. He could not understand it at all.
"I fear that you have failed to follow me, after all," he called after
her, presently. "This was the point--as to what form the gift should
take--upon which I wanted a woman's advice."
"I understand." She came back to him slowly, with bright eyes. "I know
it would please Fifi very much to have a gift from you. Had you thought
at all, yourself, what you would like to give?"
"Yes," he said, frowning vaguely, "I examined the shop windows as I came
down and pretty well decided on something. Then at the last minute I was
not altogether sure."
"Yes? Tell me what."
"I thought I would give her a pair of silk mitts."
Sharlee's eyes never left his, and her face was very sweet and grave.
"White silk ones," said he--"or black either, for that matter, for the
price is the same."
"Well," said she, "why did you select mitts, specially?"
"What first attracted me to them," he said simply, "was that they came
to precisely the sum I had planned to spend: seventy-five cents."
The little corrugation in Sharlee's brow showed how carefully she was
thinking over the young man's suggestion from all possible points of
view. You could easily follow her thought by her speaking sequence of
expressions. Clearly it ran like this: "Mitts--splendid! Just the gift
for a girl who's sick in bed. The one point to consider is, could any
other gift possibly be better? No, surely none.... Wait a minute,
though! Let's take this thing slowly and be absolutely sure we're right
before we go ahead.... Run over carefully all the things that are ever
used as gifts. Anything there that is better than mitts? Perhaps, after
all ... Mitts ... Why, look here, isn't there one small objection, one
trifling want of the fulness of perfection to be raised against the gift
of mitts?"
"There's this point against mitts," said Sharlee slowly. "Fifi's in bed
now, and I'm afraid she's likely to be there for some time. Of course
she could not wear the mitts in bed. She would have to tuck them away in
a drawer somewhere. Don't you think it might be a good idea to give her
something that she could enjoy at once--something that would give her
pleasure _now_ and so help to lighten these tedious hours while she must
be in her room?"
The mitts were the child of Queed's own brain. Unconsciously he had set
his heart on them; but his clock-like mind at once grasped the logic of
this argument, and he met it generously.
"Your point is well taken. It proves the wisdom of getting the advice of
a woman on such a matter. Now I had thought also of a book--"
"I'll tell you!" cried Sharlee, nearly bowled over by a brilliant
inspiration. "A _great_ many men that I know make it a rule to send
flowers to girls that are sick, and--"
"_Flowers!_"
"It does seem foolish--_such_ a waste, doesn't it?--but really you've no
idea how mad girls are about flowers, or how much real joy they can
bring into a sick-room. And, by changing the water often, and--so on,
they last a _long_ time, really an incredible time--"
"You recommend flowers, then? Very well," he said resolutely--"that is
settled then. Now as to the kind. I have only a botanical knowledge of
flowers--shall we say something in asters, perhaps, chrysanthemums or
dahlias? What is your advice as to that?"
"Well, I advise roses."
"Roses--good. I had forgotten them for the moment. White roses?"
A little shiver ran through her. "No, no! Let them be the reddest you
can find."
"Next, as to the cost of red roses."
"Oh, there'll be no trouble about _that_. Simply tell the florist that
you want seventy-five cents' worth, and he will give you a fine bunch of
them. By the way, I'd better put his name and address down on a piece of
paper for you. Be sure to go to this one because I know him, and he's
extremely reliable."
He took the slip 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 know that I could explain it to
you in a thoroughly logical and convincing way. The central fact, the
concrete thing, is that I do object most decidedly. I have spent too
much time in equipping myself to express valuable ideas in
discriminating language to be kicked out of a second-rate newspaper
office like an incompetent office-boy. Of course I shall not submit to
it."
"Do you care to tell me what you mean to do?"
"Do!" He hit the door-post a sudden blow with an unexpectedly large
hand. "I shall have myself elected editor of the _Post_."
"But--but--but--" said the girl, taken aback by the largeness of this
order--"But you don't expect to oust Colonel Cowles?"
"We are not necessarily speaking of to-morrow or next day. An actuary
will tell you that I am likely to outlive Colonel Cowles. I mean, first,
to have my dismissal recalled, and, second, to be made regular
assistant editor at three times my present salary. That is my immediate
reply to the directors of the Post. I am willing to let the editorship
wait till old Cowles dies."
"Tell me," said Sharlee, "would you personally like to be editor of the
_Post?_"
"_Like it!_ I'll resign the day after they elect me. Call it sheer
wounded vanity--anything you like! The name makes no difference. I know
only that I will have the editorship for a day--and all for the
worthless pleasure of pitching it in their faces." He looked past her
out of the window, and his light gray eyes filled with an indescribable
bitterness. "And to have the editorship," he thought out loud, "I must
unlearn everything that I know about writing, and deliberately learn to
write like a demagogic ass."
Sharlee tapped the calcimine with her pointed fingernails. He spoke, as
ever, with overweening confidence, but she knew that he would never win
any editorship in this spirit. He was going at the quest with a new
burst of intellectual contempt, though it was this very intellectual
contempt that had led to his downfall.
"But your own private work?"
"Don't speak of it, I beg!" He flinched uncontrollably; but of his own
accord he added, in carefully repressed tones: "To qualify for the
editorship of course means--a terrible interruption and delay. It means
that _I must side-track My Book for two months or even longer!_"
Two months! It would take him five years and probably he would not be
qualified then.