From a purely selfish point of view, which was the only point of view from which such a compact need be considered, he could hardly think that his new domestic arrangement was a success.  Greater comforts he had, of course, but it is not upon comforts that the world’s work hangs.  The important facts were that he was paying as much as he had paid at Mrs. Paynter’s, and was enjoying rather less privacy.  He and Nicolovius were friends of convenience only.  Yet somehow the old professor managed to obtrude himself perpetually upon his consciousness.  The young man began to feel an annoying sense of personal responsibility toward him, an impulse which his reason rejected utterly.

He was aware that, personally, he wished himself back at Mrs. Paynter’s and the Scriptorium.  A free man, in possession of this knowledge, would immediately pack up and return.  But that was just the trouble.  He who had always, hitherto, been the freest man in the world, appeared no longer to be free.  He was aware that he would find it very difficult to walk into the sitting-room at this moment, and tell Nicolovius that he was going to leave.  The old man would probably make a scene.  The irritating thing about it was that Nicolovius, being as solitary in the great world as he himself, actually minded his isolation, and was apparently coming to depend upon him.

But after all, he was contented here, and his work was prospering largely.  The days of his preparation for his Post labors were definitely over.  He no longer had to read or study; he stood upon his feet, and carried his editorial qualifications under his hat.  His duties as assistant editor occupied him but four or five hours a day; some three hours a day—­the allotment was inexact, for the Schedule had lost its first rigid precision—­to the Sciences of Physical Culture and Human Intercourse; all the rest to the Science of Sciences.  Glorious mornings, and hardly less glorious nights, he gave, day after day, week after week, to the great book; and because of his astonishingly enhanced vitality, he made one hour tell now as an hour and a half had told in the period of the establishment of the Scriptorium.

And now, without warning and prematurely, the jade Fortune had pitched a bomb at this new Revised Schedule of his, leaving him to decide whether he would patch up the pieces or not.  And he had decided that he would not patch them up.  Colonel Cowles was dead.  The directors of the Post might choose him to succeed the Colonel, or they might not.  But if they did choose him, he had finally made up his mind that he would accept the election.

In his attitude toward the newspaper, Queed was something like those eminent fellow-scientists of his who have set out to “expose” spiritualism and “the occult,” and have ended as the most gullible customers of the most dubious of “mediums.”  The idea of being editor for its own sake, which he had once jeered and flouted, he had gradually come to consider with large respect.  The work drew him amazingly; it was applied science of a peculiarly fascinating sort.  And in the six days of the Colonel’s illness in May, when he had full charge of the editorial page—­and again now—­he had an exhilarating consciousness of personal power which lured him, oddly, more than any sensation he had ever had in his life.