With everything else favorable, West would cheerfully have accepted these things, as being inextricably embedded in the nature of the work.  But unfortunately, everything else was not favorable.  Deeper than the grind of the routine detail, was the constant opposition and adverse criticism to which his newspaper, like every other one, was incessantly subjected.  It has long been a trite observation that no reader of any newspaper is so humble as not to be outspokenly confident that he could run that paper a great deal better than those who actually are running it.  Every upstanding man who pays a cent for a daily journal considers that he buys the right to abuse it, nay incurs the manly duty of abusing it.  Every editor knows that the highest praise he can expect is silence.  If his readers are pleased with his remarks, they nobly refrain from comment.  But if they disagree with one jot or tittle of his high-speed dissertations, he must be prepared to have quarts of ink squirted at him forthwith.

Now this was exactly the reverse of Editor West’s preferences.  He liked criticism of him to be silent, and praise of him to be shouted in the market-place.  For all his good-humor and poise, the steady fire of hostile criticism fretted him intensely.  He did not like to run through his exchanges and find his esteemed contemporaries combatting his positions, sometimes bitterly or contemptuously, and always, so it seemed to him, unreasonably and unfairly.  He did not like to have friends stop him on the street to ask why in the name of so-and-so he had said such-and-such; or, more trying still, have them pass him with an icy nod, simply because he, in some defense of truth and exploitation of the uplift, had fearlessly trod upon their precious little toes.  He did not like to have his telephone ring with an angry protest, or to get a curt letter from a railroad president (supposedly a good friend of the paper’s) desiring to know by return mail whether the clipping therewith inclosed represented the Post’s attitude toward the railroads.  A steady procession of things like these wears on the nerves of a sensitive man, and West, for all his confident exterior, was a sensitive man.  A heavy offset in the form of large and constant public eulogies was needed to balance these annoyances, and such an offset was not forthcoming.

West was older now, a little less ready in his enthusiasms, a shade less pleased with the world, a thought less sure of the eternal merits of the life of uplift.  In fact he was thirty-three years old, and he had moments, now and then, when he wondered if he were going forward as rapidly and surely as he had a right to expect.  This was the third position he had had since he left college, and it was his general expectation to graduate into a fourth before a great while.  Semple frequently urged him to return to the brokerage business; he had made an unquestioned success there at any rate.  As to Blaines College,