The young man made no reply.  Sharlee completed at her leisure her conference with the vanity-box; snapped the trinket shut; and, rising, rang the bell again.  This time she required a glass of water for her good comfort.  She drank it slowly, watching herself in the mantel mirror as she did so, and setting down the glass, took a new survey of her whole effect, this time in a long-distance view.

“Now, Mr. Queed!”

She sat down in a flowered arm-chair so large that it engulfed her, and fixed him with a studious, puckering gaze as much as to say:  “Let’s see.  Now, what was his trouble?”

“Ah, yes!—­the Post.”

She glanced at the little clock on the mantel, appeared to gather in her thoughts from remote and brilliant places, and addressed the dingy youth briskly but not unkindly.

“Unfortunately, I have an engagement this evening and can give you very little time.  You will not mind if I am brief.  Here, then, is the case.  A man employed in a minor position on a newspaper is notified that he is to be discharged for incompetence.  He replies that, so far from being discharged, he will be promoted at the end of a month, and will eventually be made editor of the paper.  Undoubtedly this is a magnificent boast, but to make it good means a complete transformation in the character of this man’s work—­namely, from entire incompetence to competence of an unusual sort, all within a month’s time.  You are the man who has made this extraordinary boast.  To clear the ground before I begin to show you where your trouble is, please tell me how you propose to make it good.”

Not every man feeling inside as the little Doctor felt at that moment would have answered with such admirable calm.

“I purpose,” he corrected her, “to take the files of the Post for the past few years and read all of Colonel Cowles’s amusing articles.  He, I am informed, is the editorial mogul and paragon.  I purpose to study those articles scientifically, to analyze them, to take them apart and see exactly how they are put together.  I purpose to destroy my own style and build up another one precisely like the Colonel’s—­if anything, a shade more so.  In short I purpose to learn to write like an ass, of asses, for asses.”

“That is your whole programme?”

“It is more than enough, I think.”

“Ah?” She paused a moment, looking at him with faint, distant amusement.  “Now, as my aunt’s business woman, I, of course, take an interest in the finances of her boarders.  Therefore I had better begin at once looking about for a new place for you after May 15th.  What other kinds of work do you think yourself qualified to do, besides editorial writing and the preparation of thesauruses?”

He looked at her darkly.  “You imagine that the Post will discharge me on May 15th?”

“There is nothing in the world that seems to me so certain.”

“And why?”