minute after his landlady's agent left him, he had become immersed in
that great work of his, and there by day and night, he had remained.
Having turned over to the agent the full responsibility for finding work
for him, he no longer had to bother his head about it. The whole matter
dropped gloriously from his mind; he read, wrote, and avoided practicing
sociology with tremendous industry; and thus he might have gone on for
no one knows how long had there not, at five o'clock on the fifth day,
come a knock upon his door.
"Well?" he called, annoyed.
Emma came in with a card. The name, at which the young man barely
glanced, conveyed nothing to him.
"Well? What does he want?"
Emma did not know.
"Oh!" said Mr. Queed, irritably--"tell him to come up, if he must."
The _Post_ director came up--two flights; he knocked; was curtly bidden
to enter; did so.
He stepped into one of the smallest rooms he had ever seen in his life;
about nine by five-and-a-half, he thought. A tiny single bed ran along
one side of it; jammed against the foot of the bed was a tiny table. A
tiny chair stood at the table; behind the chair stood a tiny bureau;
beside the bureau, the tiniest little iron wash-stand in the world. In
the chair sat a man, not tiny, indeed, but certainly nobody's prize
giant. He sat in a kind of whirling tempest of books and papers, and he
rode absorbedly in the whirlwind and majestically directed the storm.
West was intensely interested. "Mr. Queed?" he asked, from just inside
the door.
"Yes," said the other, not looking up. "What can I do for you?"
West burst out laughing; he couldn't help it.
"Maybe you can do a great deal, Mr. Queed. On the other hand maybe I can
do some little trifle for you. Which leg the boot is on nobody on earth
can say at this juncture. I have ventured to call," said he, "as an
ambassador from the morning _Post_ of this city."
"The _Post_?"
The name instantly started Queed's memory to working; he recalled
something about the _Post_--as yet, so it happened, only the copy of it
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