He peered after her briefly, then, by a series of maneuvers, set his face again in the direction he had been traveling, and proceeded magnificently on his way.... Carmel would have been more disturbed, and differently disturbed, could she have seen into the man’s mind and read what was passing in its depths. His thoughts had not so much to do with Carmel as an editor as with Carmel as a woman.
CHAPTER VII
CARMEL entered the office of the Free Press, after her encounter with Abner Fownes, in a temper which her most lenient friend could not describe as amiable. It was no small part of Carmel’s charm that she could be unamiable interestingly. Her tempers were not set pieces, like the Niagara Falls display at a fireworks celebration. They did not glow and pour and smoke until the spectators were tired of them and wanted to see something else. Rather they were like gorgeous aërial bombs which rent the remote clouds with a detonation and lighted the heavens with a multitude of colored stars. Sometimes her choicest tempers were like those progressive bombs which keep on detonating a half a dozen times and illuminating with different colored stars after each explosion. This particular temper was one of her best.
“From now on,” she said to nobody in particular, and not at all for the purpose of giving information, “this paper is going to be run for one single purpose. It’s going to do everything that pompous little fat man, with his ears growing out of his shoulders, doesn’t want it to. It’s going to hunt for things he doesn’t like. It is going to annoy and plague and prod him. If a paper like this can make a man like him uncomfortable, he’ll never know another peaceful moment....”
Evan Pell looked up from his table—over the rims of his spectacles—and regarded her with interest.
“Indeed!” he said. “And what, if I may ask, has caused this—er—declaration of policy?”
“He looked at me,” Carmel said, “and he—he wiggled all his chins at me.”
Tubal thrust his head through the doorway. “What’d he do?” he demanded, belligerently. “If he done anythin’ a gent shouldn’t do to a lady I’ll jest ca’mly walk over there and twist three-four of them chins clean off’n him.”
“I wish you would.... I wish you would.... But you mustn’t.... He gave me orders. He told me I was to let him read every bit of copy which went into this paper. He said I must have his O. K. on everything I print.”
“Ah!” said Evan Pell. “And what did you rejoin?”