show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent quality--but
dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working evenly without
regard to his feelings or physical condition. The night my oldest child
died--I was editor of a country newspaper--I wrote my leaders as usual. I
never had written better. You can be absolute master inside, if you will.
You can learn to use your feelings when they're helpful and to shut them
off when they hinder."

"But don't you think that temperament----"

"Temperament--that's one of the subtlest forms of self-excuse. However, the
place is yours. The salary is a hundred and twenty-five a week--an advance
of about twelve hundred a year, I believe, on your average downstairs. Can
you begin soon?"

"Immediately," said Howard, "if the City Editor is satisfied."

An office boy showed him to his room--a mere hole-in-the-wall with just
space for a table-desk, a small table, a case of shelves for books of
reference, and two chairs. The one window overlooked the lower end of
Manhattan Island--the forest of business buildings peaked with the
Titan-tenements of financial New York. Their big, white plumes of smoke and
steam were waving in the wind and reflecting in pale pink the crimson of
the setting sun.

Howard had his first taste of the intoxication of triumph, his first deep
inspiration of ambition. He recalled his arrival in New York, his timidity,
his dread lest he should be unable to make a living--"Poor boy," they used
to say at home, "he will have to be supported. He is too much of a
dreamer." He remembered his explorations of those now familiar streets--how