pawnshop. The man must have killed the children first. They lay side by
side on the bed, each with its hands folded on its chest--suppose the
mother did that; and each little throat was cut from ear to ear--suppose
the father did that. Then he dipped his paint brush in the blood and daubed
on the wall in big scrawling letters: 'There is no God!' Then he took his
wife in his arms, stabbed her to the heart and cut his own throat. And
there they lay, his arms about her, his cheek against hers, dead. It was
murder as a fine art. Gad, I wish I could write."

Kittredge introduced Howard--"a Yale man--just came on the paper."

"Entering the profession? Well, they say of the other professions that
there is always room at the top. Journalism is just the reverse. The room
is all at the bottom--easy to enter, hard to achieve, impossible to leave.
It is all bottom, no top." Sewell nodded, smiled attractively in spite of
his swollen face and his unsightly teeth, and went back to his work.

"He's sober," said Kittredge when he was out of hearing, "so his story is
pretty sure to be the talk of Park Row tomorrow."

Howard was astonished at the cheerful, businesslike point of view of these
two educated and apparently civilised young men as to the tragedies of
life. He had shuddered at Kittredge's story of the man squeezed to death by
the snake. Sewell's story, so graphically outlined, filled him with horror,
made it a struggle for him to conceal his feelings.

"I suppose you must see a lot of frightful things," he suggested.

"That's our business. You soon get used to it, just as a doctor does. You
learn to look at life from the purely professional standpoint. Of course