Malcolm would seize a paper from the unread heap, whirl it open and send
his glance and his long pointed nose tearing down one column and up
another, and so from page to page. It took less than a minute for him to
finish and filing away great sixteen page dailies. A few seconds sufficed
for the smaller papers. Occasionally he took his long shears and with a
skilful twist cut out a piece from the middle of a page and laid it and the
shears upon the table with a single motion.

"Now, Mr. Howard." Malcolm sent the last paper to increase the chaos on the
floor and faced about in his revolving chair. "How would you like to come
up here?"

Howard looked at him in amazement. "You mean----"

"We want you to join the editorial staff. Mr. Walker has married him a rich
wife and is going abroad to do literary work, which means that he is going
to do nothing. Will you come?"

"It is what I have been working for."

"And very hard you have worked." Mr. Malcolm's cold face relaxed into a
half-friendly, half-satirical smile. "After you'd been sending up articles
for a fortnight, I knew you'd make it. You went about it systematically. An
intelligent plan, persisted in, is hard to beat in this world of laggards
and hap-hazard strugglers."

"And I was on the point of giving up--that is, giving up this particular
ambition," Howard confessed.

"Yes, I saw it in your articles--a certain pessimism and despondency. You