“Perhaps you now begin to glimpse a wider difference between yourself and Colonel Cowles than mere unlikeness of literary style.  If you continue to think this difference all in your own favor, I urge you to abandon any idea of writing editorials for the Post.  If on the other hand, you seriously wish to make good your boast of this morning, I urge you to cease sneering at men like Colonel Cowles, and humbly begin to try to imitate them.  I say that you are a failure as an editorial writer because you are a failure as a man, and I say that you are a failure as a man because you have no relation at all with man’s life.  You aspire to teach and lead human beings, and you have not the least idea what a human being is, and not the slightest wish to find out.  All around you are men, live men of flesh and blood, who are moving the world, and you, whipping out your infinitesimal measuring-rod, dismiss them as inferior cattle who know nothing of text-book science.  Here is a real and living world, and you roll through it like a billiard-ball.  And all because you make the fatal error of mistaking a sorry handful of mummies for the universe.”

“It is a curious coincidence,” said Queed, with great but deceptive mildness, “that Fifi said much the same thing to me, though in quite a different way, this afternoon.”

“She told me.  But Fifi was not the first.  You had the same advice from your father two months ago.”

“My father?”

“You have not forgotten his letter that you showed me in your office one afternoon?”

It seemed that he had; but he had it in his pocket, as it chanced, and dug it out, soiled and frayed from long confinement.  Stooping forward to introduce it into the penumbra of lamplight, he read over the detective-story message:  “Make friends:  mingle with people and learn to like them.  This is the earnest injunction of Your father.”

“You complain of your father’s treatment of you,” said Sharlee, “but he offered you a liberal education there, and you declined to take it.”

She glanced at the clock, turned about to the table and picked up her beautiful bouquet.  A pair of long bodkins with lavender glass heads were waiting, it appeared; she proceeded to pin on her flowers, adjusting them with careful attention; and rising, again reviewed herself in the mantel-mirror.  Then she sat down once more, and calmly said: 

“As you are a failure as an editorial writer and as a man, so you are a failure as a sociologist ...”

It was the last straw, the crowning blasphemy.  She hardly expected him to endure it, and he did not; she was glad to have it so.  But the extreme mildness with which he interrupted her almost unnerved her, so confidently had she braced herself for violence.

“Do you mind if we omit that?  I think I have heard enough about my failures for one night.”

He had risen, but stood, for a wonder, irresolute.  It was too evident that he did not know what to do next.  Presently, having nowhere else to go, he walked over to the mantel-shelf and leant his elbow upon it, staring down at the floor.  A considerable interval passed, broken only by the ticking of the clock before he said:—­