The Post’s tax reform scheme went through with a bang.  Out of loose odds and ends of vague discontent, Queed had succeeded in creating a body of public sentiment that became invincible.  Moreover, this scheme cost nothing.  On the contrary, by a rearrangement of items and a stricter system of assessment, it promised, as the Post frequently remarked, to put hundreds of thousands into the treasury.  But the reformatory was a horse of a totally different color.  Here was a proposal, for a mere supposititious moral gain, evanescent as air, to take a hundred thousand dollars of hard money out of the crib, and saddle the State with an annual obligation, to boot.  An excellent thing in itself, but a most unreasonable request of an economy session, said the organization leaders.  In fact, this hundred thousand dollars happened to be precisely the hundred thousand dollars they needed to lubricate “the organization,” and discharge, by some choice new positions, a few honorable obligations incurred during the campaign.

Now it was written in the recesses of the assistant editor’s being, those parts of him which he never thought of mentioning to anybody, that the reformatory bill must pass.  Various feelings had gradually stiffened an early general approval into a rock-ribbed resolve.  It was on a closely allied theme that he had first won his editorial spurs—­the theme of Klinker’s “blaggards,” who made reformatories necessary.  That was one thing:  a kind of professional sentiment which the sternest scientist need not be ashamed to acknowledge.  And then, beyond that, his many talks with Klinker had invested the campaign for the reformatory with a warmth of meaning which was without precedent in his experience.  This was, in fact, his first personal contact with the suffering and sin of the world, his first grapple with a social problem in the raw.  Two years before, when he had offered to write an article on this topic for the Assistant Secretary of Charities, his interest in a reformatory had been only the scientific interest which the trained sociologist feels in all the enginery of social reform.  But now this institution had become indissolubly connected in Queed’s mind with the case of Eva Bernheimer, whom Buck Klinker knew, Eva Bernheimer who was “in trouble” at sixteen, and had now “dropped out.”  A reformatory had become in his thought a living instrument to catch the Eva Bernheimers of this world, and effectually prevent them from dropping out.

And apart from all this, here was the first chance he had ever had to do a service for Sharlee Weyland.

However, the bill stuck obstinately in committee.  Now the session was more than half over, February was nearly gone, and there it still stuck.  And when it finally came out, it was evidently going to be a toss of a coin whether it would be passed by half a dozen votes, or beaten by an equal number.  But there was not the slightest doubt that the great majority of the voters, so far as they were interested in it at all, wanted it passed, and the tireless Post was prodding the committee every other day, observing that now was the time, etc., and demanding in a hundred forceful ways, how about it?