But because Sharlee had known Queed well as a man who loved truth, because the very thing that she had seen and most admired in him from the beginning was an unflinching honesty of intellect and character, because of the remembrance of his face as she had last seen it:  a tiny corner of her mind, in defiance of all reason, revolted against this condemnation and refused to shut tight against him.  All morning she sat at her work, torn by anxiety, hoping every moment that her telephone might ring with some unthought-of explanation, which would leave her with nothing worse upon her mind than the dead reformatory.  But though the telephone rang often, it was never for this.

* * * * *

Sitting in a corner of the House gallery, about noon, Mr. Dayne saw the reformatory bill, which he himself had written, called up out of order and snowed under.  The only speech was made by the Solon who had the bill called up, a familiar organization wheelhorse, named Meachy T. Bangor, who quoted with unconcealed triumph from the morning’s Post, wholly ignoring all the careful safeguards and tearing out of the context only such portions as suited his humor and his need.  Mr. Bangor pointed out that, inasmuch as the “acknowledged organ” of the State Department of Charities now at length “confessed” that the reformatory had better wait two years, there were no longer two sides to the question.  Many of the gentleman’s hearers appeared to agree with him.  They rose and fell upon the bill, and massacred it by a vote of 54 to 32.

From “Sis” Hopkins, legislative reporter of the Post, the news went skipping over the telephone wire to the editorial rooms, where the assistant editor, who received it, remarked that he was sorry to hear it.  That done, the assistant hung up the receiver, and resumed work upon an article entitled “A Constitution for Turkey?” He had hardly added a sentence to this composition before West came in and, with a cheery word of greeting, passed into his own office.

The assistant editor went on with his writing.  He looked worn this morning, Henry Surface’s son, and not without reason.  Half the night he had shared the nurse’s vigil at the bedside of Surface, who lay in unbroken stupor.  Half the night he had maintained an individual vigil in his own room, lying flat on his back and staring wide-eyed into the darkness.  And on the heels of the day, there had come new trouble for him, real trouble, though in the general cataclysm its full bearings and farther reaches did not at once come home to him.  Running professionally through the Post at breakfast-time, his eye, like Miss Weyland’s, had been suddenly riveted by that paper’s remarks upon the reformatory....  What was the meaning of the staggering performance he had no idea, and need not inquire.  Its immediate effect upon his own career was at least too plain for argument.  His editorship and his reformatory had gone down together.