“Oh-h-ho!” said West, slowly and dubiously.  “Do you mean my article on the reformatory?”

“Yes—­I do.”

“Why, my dear fellow!”

West paused, his handsome eyes clouded, considering how best he might put the matter to overcome most surely the singular scruples of his assistant.

“Let’s take it this way, old fellow.  Suppose that my standpoint in that article was diametrically wrong.  I am sure I could convince you that it was not, but admit, for argument’s sake, that it was.  Do you feel that the appearance in the paper of an article with which you don’t agree makes it necessary for you, in honor, to resign?”

“No, certainly not—­”

“Is it that you don’t like my turning down one of your articles and printing one of my own instead?  I didn’t know you objected to that, old fellow.  You see—­while your judgment is probably a hanged sight better than mine, after all I am the man who is held responsible, and I am paid a salary to see that my opinions become the opinions of the Post.”

“It is entirely right that your opinions—­”

“Then wherein have I offended?  Be frank with me, like a good fellow, I beg you!”

Queed eyed him strangely.  Was the editor’s inner vision really so curiously astigmatic?

“I look at it this way,” he said, in a slow, controlled voice.  “The Post has said again and again that this legislature must establish a reformatory.  That was the burden of a long series of editorials, running back over a year, which, as I thought, had your entire approval.  Now, at the critical moment, when it was only necessary to say once more what had been said a hundred times before, the Post suddenly turns about and, in effect, authorizes this legislature not to establish the reformatory.  The House killed the bill just now.  Bangor quoted from the Post editorial.  There can be no doubt, of course, that it turned a number of votes—­enough to have safely carried the bill.”

West looked disturbed and unhappy.

“But if we find out that this legislature is so drained by inescapable expenses that it simply cannot provide the I money?  Suppose the State had been swept by a plague?  Suppose there was a war and a million of unexpected expenses had suddenly dropped on us from the clouds?  Wouldn’t you agree that circumstances altered cases, and that, under such circumstances, everything that was not indispensable to the State’s existence would have to go over?”

Queed felt like answering West’s pepper-fire of casuistry by throwing Eva Bernheimer at his head.  Despite his determination to avoid a “scene,” he felt his bottled-up indignation rising.  A light showed in his stone-gray eyes.

“Can’t you really see that these circumstances are not in the least like those?  Did you do me the courtesy to read what I wrote about this so-called ‘economy argument’ last night?”