Since it took several days for the dissemination of the bureau's material, as everything went from its offices made up into plates and boxed for express, all of its offerings had to be prepared with a wholesome disregard as to dates. This somewhat handicapped the dramatic editor, who found it necessary to write bright and ingenious criticisms of plays without first witnessing their performance—although, it must be confessed, any difficulty on this score was usually obviated by making all notices unreservedly eulogistic—otherwise remote editors later on wrote in complaining of the loss of passes for those same performances when they ventured out on the road and joined hands with the bureau in that common and most commendable pursuit of stimulating the imagination of the masses.
Midsummer in the bureau always saw the staff in the midst of their Christmas literature, which, like its other anniversary material, was made up into pages, with a generous sprinkling of highly appropriate pictures of snow scenes and swinging bells and smiling Santa Clauses. Year after year these same pictures were taken down from their dusty shelves, and then year after year were duly stored away again for another season's use. Summer fiction, in the same way, was always manufactured during the winter months, by writers crouching forlornly over cheerless little gas-heaters. The bureau possessed a couple of "hands" surprisingly expert at this novelette work, who labored with the assistance of the back numbers of the less prominent magazines, and seemed possessed of the pleasing thought that what the world most loved was an old friend in new clothes.
One of Hartley's first lessons—and there were many of them to be learned—had been that no article, editorial, or story must "slop over." This phrase was interpreted to him as meaning that no article must be one line longer than the strictly allotted space. If such proved the case the editorial blue pencil performed the necessary amputation, and the child of the expansive mind was crowded into its page sadly bereft of limbs, and often enough of all genuine sense and coherence. Hartley had acquired the art, too, of writing poetry to order, suitable for the bureau's stock illustrations, while the compositor waited at his elbow, with his make-up suspended until the necessary lines were duly indited.
The young scholar from Oxford had been not a little amused, in secret, at the duties of the person who was known as the comic editor. The chief task of this editor seemed to be a ruthless scalping of the foreign humorous weeklies and a conscientious and often laborious adjustment of the witticisms of Punch to the American understanding. He was equally amused to find that the Republican editor and the Democratic editor were one and the same person, a mild-mannered and kindly faced old gentleman in a faded green suit, who on alternate days furiously wrote the most scathing political leaders back at himself.
Hartley himself had been carefully warned never to touch on religion, politics, or even locality in any of his contributions. It had also been impressed on his bewildered brain that there existed in American public life a mysterious factor known as the "Irish element," and that under no circumstances must he express any opinion or make any allusion which might be interpreted as offensive to this element. If in doubt, his editor commanded, he must be as Anglophobic as possible. He was also to make it a point to wax gently sarcastic, even playfully malicious, when speaking of that effete and overluxurious city New York—the name of which, it appeared, was bitter in the mouth of all outsiders. Hartley could never fathom why this was, but it was. And that seemed enough. He learned to feel less uncomfortable masquerading under his different pen-names after discovering that the heavily bearded old German who smoked bad tobacco at the desk next to his own flourished in the columns of the Woman's and Fashion Page as Daisy Dineen, the unquestioned authority on dumpling recipes in ten thousand unsuspecting homes.
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."