Westcoate office and grumble and then follow orders.

Old Simon Gratz came into the president's office one morning and sat
himself into a vacant chair with a grunt of disapprobation, the same
grunt of disapprobation that had been like saw-filing to the nerves of
the president for many years, and the president immediately prepared to
contradict him, regardless of what it might be that Simon Gratz
disapproved of. It happened to be the simplified spelling. He waved the
morning paper at the president and wanted to know what _he_ thought of
this outrageous thing of chopping off the tails of good old English
words with an official carving-knife, ruining a language that had been
fought and bled for at Lexington, and making it look like a dialect
story, or a woman with two front teeth out.

It rather strained the president sometimes to think of a sound train of
argument against Simon Gratz at a moment's notice. Sometimes he had to
abandon the beliefs of a lifetime in order to take the other side of a
proposition that Simon Gratz announced unexpectedly, and it was still
harder to get up an enthusiasm for one side of a thing of which he had
never heard, as he sometimes had to do; but he was ready to meet Simon
Gratz on either side of the simplified spelling matter, for he had read
about it himself in the morning paper. It had seemed a rather
unimportant matter until Simon Gratz mentioned it, but now it
immediately became a thing of the most intimate concern.

"What do I think?" he asked. "I think it is the grandest thing--the most
sensible thing--the greatest step forward that has been taken for
centuries. That is what I think. It is a revolution! That is what I
think, Mr. Gratz."