Landlady's Agent; of the Agent's Other Title, etc._
While all move in slots in this world, Mr. Queed's slot was infinitely
more clearly marked than any of his neighbors'. It ran exclusively
between the heaven of his room and the hades of the _Post_ office;
manifesting itself at the latter place in certain staid writings done in
exchange for ten dollars, currency of the realm, paid down each and
every Saturday. Into this slot he had been lifted, as it were by the
ears, by a slip of a girl of the name of Charlotte Lee Weyland, though
it was some time before he ever thought of it in that way.
In the freemasonry of the boarding-house, the young man was early
accepted as he was. He was promptly voted the driest, most uninteresting
and self-absorbed savant ever seen. Even Miss Miller, ordinarily
indefatigable where gentlemen were concerned, soon gave him up. To Mr.
Bylash she spoke contemptuously of him, but secretly she was awed by his
stately manner of speech and his godlike indifference to all pleasures,
including those of female society. Of them all, Nicolovius was the only
one who seemed in the least impressed by Mr. Queed's appointment as
editorial writer on the _Post_. With the others the exalted world he
moved in was so remote from theirs that no surprises were possible
there, and if informed that the little Doctor had been elected president
of Harvard University, it would have seemed all in the day's work to
William Klinker. Klinker was six feet high, red-faced and friendly, and
Queed preferred his conversation above any heard at Mrs. Paynter's
table. It reminded him very much of his friend the yeggman in New York.
What went on behind the door of the tiny Scriptorium the boarders could
only guess. It may be said that its owner's big grievance against the
world was that he had to leave it occasionally to earn his bread and
meat. Apart from this he never left it in those days except for one
reason, viz., the consumption three times a day of the said bread and
meat. Probably this was one explanation of the marked pallor of his
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