"You don't, eh! H'm; I guess you don't." He seemed bent on provoking beyond endurance the young man with the accent. And the young man with the accent could foresee that it was going to lead to but one end. He swallowed his wrath, however, and his editor swung round in his swivel chair, and replacing his cigar in its accustomed corner of a mouth that seemed to Hartley belligerently dog-like, looked at him shrewdly.
"Give 'er half a column," he said sharply.
"That's not very much, is it?"
"What d'you want to give 'er?"
"It's outside work, you know—work that I'm doing quite gratuitously," he added significantly.
"Well, how much d'you want?"
"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.