These were the offices and this was the atmosphere into which Hartley listlessly came the morning after his interview with Cordelia Vaughan, when he had faltered in telling her his real verdict on The Unwise Virgins. This was the bitter gateway through which he had once dreamed he could enter some Eden of eminence.
As he passed to his desk and mopped the dust from it with an old newspaper, the place and all it stood for filled him with a sudden new-born disgust and weariness, a feeling more reckless than any which had before taken possession of him. He was sick of the smell of turpentine and printers' ink. He was sick of the unventilated rooms and the bad light. Daisy Dineen's tobacco-smoke drifted smotheringly about him. A plaintive minor note seemed to creep into the tinkling chorus of the many busy typewriters behind many little wooden partitions. There seemed something ghoulish and subterranean in the stooped, dimly lighted crooked figures of the patient writers about him. If earth's voracious readers beyond the pale only knew and understood!
Hartley was leaning disconsolately on his elbow, thinking this thought, when the shrill and slightly nasal voice of the managing editor called him. He got up and went listlessly to the editorial desk, still hearing some note of latent pathos in the patient tinkling of the many typewriters.
"Look here, Lord Haughtly"--from his first day with the bureau they had dubbed him Lord Haughtly, the opprobriousness of which he had born with good-natured and smiling resignation--"what stuff have you turned in this last week?"
It seemed to the young disseminator of information that the question was asked in an unusually peremptory tone of voice. He was ready to overlook such things, however, for in days gone by this rough-and-ready man of affairs had not been altogether unkind to him, in his unconscious, careless way. He remembered, too, that he had come to the bureau an unknown and penniless youth, and that he was still one of the "probationers."
"Nothing much this week, I'm afraid," he answered.
"Nothing, eh?" said the controller of the destinies of journalistic literature, as he viewed the end of his cigar, which had all the appearance of a well-worn paint-brush. "You don't seem to be aching much to get on the pay-roll this week?"