"Give 'er half a column," he said sharply.
"It's outside work, you know--work that I'm doing quite gratuitously," he added significantly.
"Two columns of brevier--without the adornment of the usual line-cut."
The character of the line-cuts used by the bureau, seldom remarkable for their beauty, was a standing joke about the office. The editor smiled enigmatically.
"All right; go ahead and kill your friend with kindness if y' want to." For as a young man he himself had been a dramatic reporter in his time and more than once had been dazzled by the passing refulgence of musical comedy stars--stars with hair not half so golden as Cordelia Vaughan's.
Hartley hurried home through the dingy lower-town streets, turning over many new thoughts in his mind. A revulsion of feeling had come over him. He had not as yet read The Silver Poppy, but he took a sudden, passing, unreasonable dislike to it, wondering within himself how much Cordelia Vaughan's success had been due to caprice and accident.
His thoughts went back to her luxuriously furnished little study, with the writing-desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the little gold pen which she had proudly pointed out to him as her mascot--the only pen with which she could compose--the trim rows of handsomely bound books of reference, the huge dictionary on its highly polished revolving stand, the current magazines all so temptingly at hand, the quiet atmosphere and seclusion of the place that in itself was a stimulus to creation. He thought, not a little wistfully, how good it must be to have a circle of intelligently appreciative friends, an audience to whom to direct one's sincerest and best work, and, above all, to nurse to one's breast the knowledge of some tangible influence in the circle of letters. He remembered that she had told him her gift for writing had come to her unheralded and unlooked for; that one morning she had wakened and rubbed her eyes and found herself famous. How much of it, he wondered, lay in sheer luck, or, at most, in happy coincident? He recalled, not unenviously, his own years of ceaseless effort that had culminated in nothing. It was a gift, this swinging round to the tides of the time, this writing with the ear to the ground. With that gift he felt he might never have been left drifting so aimlessly and so fruitlessly about a world in which there still seemed to be for him no ultimate islands of contentment.