He picked up Queed’s article and glanced again at the astonishing words, words which, invested with the Post’s enormous prestige, simply kicked and cuffed the party to its ruin.  A wave of resentment against his assistant swept through the editor’s mind.  This was what came of trusting anything to anybody else.  If you wanted to be sure that things were done right, do them yourself.  Because he had allowed Queed a little rope, that young man had industriously gathered in almost enough to hang, not himself, for he was nothing, but the Post and its editor.  However, there was no use crying over spilt milk.  What was done was done.  Fortunately, the Post’s general position was sound; had not the editor himself dictated it?  If the expression of that position in cold type had been gradually carried by a subordinate to a more and more violent extreme, to an intemperance of utterance which closely approached insanity, what was it the editor’s duty to do?  Obviously to take charge himself and swing the position back to a safe and sane mean, exactly where he had placed it to begin with.  That was all that was asked of him—­to shift back the paper’s position to where he had placed it in the beginning, and by so doing to save the party from wreck.  Could a sensible man hesitate an instant?  And in return....

West’s gaze wandered out of the window, and far on into the beyond....  His friends were watching him, silently but fearfully.  Who and what these friends were his swift thought did not stay to ask.  His glamorous fancy saw them as a great anxious throng, dominant men, yet respectful, who were trembling lest he should make a fatal step—­to answer for it with his political life.  Public life—­he rejected the term political life—­was of all things what he was preeminently fitted for.  How else could a man so fully serve his fellows?—­how so surely and strongly promote the uplift?  And Plonny Neal had served notice on him that he stood to-day on the crossroads to large public usefulness.  The czar of them all, the great Warwick who made and unmade kings by the lifting of his finger, had told him, as plain as language could speak, that he, West, was his imperial choice for the mayoralty, with all that that foreshadowed....  Truly, he had served his apprenticeship, and was meet for his opportunity.  For eight long months he had stood in line, doing his duty quietly and well, asking no favor of anybody.  And now at last Warwick had beckoned him and set the mystic star upon his forehead....

Iridescent visionry enwrapped the young man, and he swam in it goldenly.  In time his spirit returned to his body, and he found himself leaning back in a very matter-of-fact chair, facing a very plain question.  How could the shifting back, the rationalizing, of the paper’s position be accomplished with the minimum of shock?  How could he rescue the party with the least possible damage to the Post’s consistency?