He took the slip from her, thanked her, bowed gravely, and turned to go.  A question had risen involuntarily to the tip of her tongue; it hung there for a breath, its fate in the balance; and then she released it, casually, when another second would have been too late.

“How is your work on the Post going?”

He wheeled as though she had struck him, and looked at her with a sudden odd hardening of the lower part of his face.

“The Post discharged me this morning.”

“Oh—­”

It was all that she could say, for she knew it very well.  She had had it from Colonel Cowles two days before it happened, which was three days after the April meeting of the directors.  Charles Gardiner West, who was to have raised his voice in behalf of Mr. Queed on that occasion, happened not to be present at all.  Having effected the dissolution of Semple and West, he had gone to the country for a month’s rest, in preparation for that mapping out of collegiate plans which was to precede his tour of Europe.  Hence the directors, hearing no protests from intercessors, unanimously bestowed discretion upon the Colonel to replace the transcendental scientist with a juicier assistant at a larger salary.

“At least,” the young man qualified, with a curious mixture of aggressiveness and intense mortification, “the Post will discharge me on the 15th day of May unless I show marked improvement.  I believe that improvement was exactly the word the estimable Colonel employed.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” said Sharlee—­“awfully!  But after all, you want only some routine hack-work—­any routine hack-work—­to establish a little income.  It will not be very hard to find something else, as good or even better.”

“You do not appear to grasp the fact that, apart from any considerations of that sort, this is an unpleasant, a most offensive thing to have happen—­”

“Oh, but that is just what it isn’t, Mr. Queed,” said Sharlee, who quite failed to appreciate his morbid tenderness for even the least of his intellectual offspring.  “You have taken no pride in the newspaper work; you look down on it as altogether beneath you.  You cannot mind this in any personal way—­”

“I mind it,” said he, “like the devil.”

The word fell comically from his lips, but Sharlee, leaning against the shut door, looked at him with grave sympathy in her eyes.

“Mr. Queed, if you had tried to write nursery rhymes and—­failed, would you have taken it to heart?”

“Never mind arguing it.  In fact, I don’t know that I could explain it to you in a thoroughly logical and convincing way.  The central fact, the concrete thing, is that I do object most decidedly.  I have spent too much time in equipping myself to express valuable ideas in discriminating language to be kicked out of a second-rate newspaper office like an incompetent office-boy.  Of course I shall not submit to it.”