any of the Mercuries that were willing.  Most of the Mercuries were willing, and on these early Saturday nights, Stark’s rocked with the falls of Dr. Queed.  But under Klinker’s stern discipline, he was already acquiring something like a form.  By midsummer he had gained a small reputation for scientific precision buttressed by invincible inability to learn when he was licked, and autumn found many of the Mercuries decidedly less Barkis-like than of old.

Queed lived now in the glow of perfect physical health, a very different thing, as Fifi had once pointed out, from merely not feeling sick.  In the remarkable development that his body was undergoing, he had found an unexpected pride.  But the Mercury, though he hardly realized it at the time, was useful to him in a bigger way than bodily improvement.

Here he met young men who were most emphatically in touch with life.  They treated him as an equal with reference to his waxing muscular efficiency, and with some respect as regards his journalistic connection.  “Want you to shake hands with the editor of the Post,” so kindly Buck would introduce him.  After the bouts or the “exhibition” of a Saturday, there was always a smoker, and in the highly instructed and expert talk of his club-mates the Doctor learned many things that were to be of value to him later on.  Some of the Mercuries, besides their picturesque general knowledge, knew much more about city politics than ever got into the papers.  There was Jimmy Wattrous, for example, already rising into fame as Plonny Neal’s most promising lieutenant.  Jimmy bared his heart with the Mercuries, and was particularly friendly with the representative of the great power which moulds public opinion.  Now and then, Neal himself looked in, Plonny, the great boss, who was said to hold the city in the hollow of his hand.  Many an editorial that surprised and pleased Colonel Cowles was born in that square room back of Stark’s.

And all these things took time ... took time....  And there were nights when Queed woke wide-eyed with cold sweat on his brow and the cold fear in his heart that he and posterity were being cheated, that he was making an irretrievable and ghastly blunder.

Desperate months were May, June, and July for the little Doctor.  In all this time he never once put his own pencil to his own paper.  Manuscript and Schedule lay locked together in a drawer, toward which he could never bear to glance.  Thirteen hours a day he gave to the science of editorial writing; two hours a day to the science of physical culture; one hour a day (computed average) to the science of Human Intercourse; but to the Science of Sciences never an hour on never a day.  The rest was food and sleep.  Such was his life for three months; a life that would have been too horrible to contemplate, had it not been that in all of his new sciences he uncovered a growing personal interest which kept him constantly astonished at himself.