“Why will the Post discharge you?  For exactly the same reason it promises to discharge you now.  Incompetence.”

“You agree with Colonel Cowles, then?  You consider me incompetent to write editorials for the Post?”

“Oh, totally.  And it goes a great deal deeper than style, I assure you.  Mr. Queed, you’re all wrong from the beginning.”

Her eyes left his face; went first to the clock; glanced around the room.  Sharlee’s dress was blue, and her neck was as white as a wave’s foamy tooth.  Her manner was intended to convey to Mr. Queed that he was the smallest midge on all her crowded horizon.  It did not, of course, have that effect, but it did arrest and pique his attention most successfully.  It was in his mind that Charles Weyland had been of some assistance to him in first suggesting work on the Post; and again about the roses for Fifi.  He was still ready to believe that she might have some profitable suggestion about his new problem.  Was she not that “public” and that “average reader” which he himself so despised and detested?  Yet he could not imagine where such a little pink and white chit found the hardihood to take this tone with one of the foremost scientists of modern times.

“You interest me.  I am totally incompetent now; I will be totally incompetent on May 15th; this because I am all wrong from the beginning.  Pray proceed.”

Sharlee, her thoughts recalled, made a slight inclination of her head.  “Forgive my absent-mindedness.  First, then, as to why you are a failure as an editorial writer.  You are quite mistaken in supposing that it is a mere question of style, though right in regarding your style as in itself a fatal handicap.  However, the trouble has its root in your amusing attitude of superiority to the work.  You think of editorial writing as small hack-work, entirely beneath the dignity of a man who has had one or two articles accepted by a prehistoric magazine which nobody reads.  In reality, it is one of the greatest and most splendid of all professions, fit to call out the very best of a really big man.  You chuckle and sneer at Colonel Cowles and think yourself vastly his superior as an editorial writer, when, in the opinion of everybody else, he is in every way your superior.  I doubt if the Post has a single reader who would not prefer to read an article by him, on any subject, to reading an article by you.  I doubt if there is a paper in the world that would not greatly prefer him as an editor to you—­”

“You are absurdly mistaken,” he interrupted coldly.  “I might name various papers—­”