“It is not my hat.”

“Oh—­what is it?”

“God knows,” said the little Doctor, hoarsely.

He was standing in the middle of the floor, his hands jammed into his trousers pockets, his hair tousled over a troubled brow, his breast torn by emotions which were entirely new in his experience and which he didn’t even know the names of.  All the accumulation of his disruptive day was upon him.  He felt both terrifically upset inside, and interested to the degree of physical pain in something or other, he had no idea what.  Presently he started walking up and down the room, nervous as a caged lion, eyes fixed on space or on something within, while Sharlee stood in the doorway watching him casually and unsurprised, as though just this sort of thing took place in her little parlor regularly, seven nights a week.

“Go ahead!  Go ahead!” he broke out abruptly, coming to a halt.  “Pitch into me.  Do it for all you’re worth.  I suppose you think it’s what I need.”

“Certainly,” said Sharlee, pleasantly.

She stood beside her chair again, flushed with a secret sense of victory, liking him more for his temper and his control than she ever could have liked him for his learning.  But it was not her idea that the little Doctor had got it anywhere near hard enough as yet.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Queed?”

It appeared that Mr. Queed would.

“I am paying you the extraordinary compliment,” said Sharlee, “of talking to you as others might talk about you behind your back—­in fact, as everybody does talk about you behind your back.  I do this on the theory that you are a serious and honest-minded man, sincerely interested in learning the truth about yourself and your failures, so that you may correct them.  If you are interested only in having your vanity fed by flattering fictions, please say so right now.  I have no time,” she said, hardly able for her life to suppress a smile, “for butterflies and triflers.”

Butterflies and triflers! Mr. Queed, proprietor of the famous Schedule, a butterfly and a trifler!

He said in a muffled voice:  “Proceed.”

“Since an editorial writer,” said Sharlee, seating herself and beginning with a paragraph as neat as a public speaker’s, “must be able, as his first qualification, to interest the common people, it is manifest that he must be interested in the common people.  He must feel his bond of humanity with them, sympathize with them, like them, love them.  This is the great secret of Colonel Cowles’s success as an editor.  A fine gentleman by birth, breeding, and tradition, he is yet always a human being among human beings.  All his life he has been doing things with and for the people.  He went all through the war, and you might have thought the whole world depended on him, the way he went up Cemetery Ridge on the 3rd of July, 1863.  He was shot all to pieces, but they patched him together, and the next year there he was back in the fighting