“I must go to bed,” she said aloud. She hardly touched the pillow before she was sound asleep—the sleep of exhaustion, of content, of the battle won. After several hours she awakened. “I’m so glad my ‘better self’ told Nancy to say I wasn’t at home,” she thought. “That makes me know that I was—what was I?” But before she could answer she was again asleep.
The next morning Joan at breakfast suddenly lifted her eyes from her newspaper and her coffee, listened and smiled. Emily was singing at her bath.
CHAPTER XXV.
MR. GAMMELL PRESUMES.
MR. WAKEMAN, under whom she had been working comfortably, was now displaced by a Mr. Gammell, whom she had barely seen and of whom she had heard alarming tales. He had been made City Editor when Stilson was promoted. Tireless and far-sighted and insatiable as a news-gatherer, he drove those under him “as if eating and sleeping had been abolished,” one of them complained. But he made the Democrat’s local news the best in New York, and this gradually impressed the public and raised the circulation. Gammell was a sensationalist—“the yellowest yet,” the reporters called him—and Stilson despised him. But Stilson was too capable a journalist not to appreciate his value. He encouraged him and watched him closely, taking care to keep from print the daily examples of his reckless “overzeal.”
As the Sunday edition ought to be the most profitable issue of a big newspaper, the proprietors decided to transfer Gammell to it, after cautioning him to remember Stilson’s training and do nothing to destroy the “character” of the paper. Gammell began with a “shake-up” of his assistants. Emily, just returned from a midsummer vacation, was opening her desk, when another woman of the Sunday staff, Miss Venable, whom she had never seen at the office this early before, began to tell her the dire news. “He’s good-looking and polite,” she said, “but he has no respect for feelings and no consideration about the quantity of work. He treats us as if we were so many machines.”
“That isn’t strange or startling, is it?” said Emily indifferently. “He’s like most successful men. I always feared Mr. Wakeman was too easy-going, too good to last. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a change before.”
“Just wait till you’ve had an experience with him. He told me—he called me in this morning and said with a polite grin—what a horrid grin he has!—that he was pained that I did not like my position on the Sunday staff. And when I protested that I did, he said, ‘It’s good of you to say so, Miss Venable, but your work tells a truth which you are too considerate of me to speak.’ And then he went on to show that he has been sneaking and spying on me about reading novels in office hours and staying out too long at lunch time. Think of that!”
“He may be watching you now,” suggested Emily.
“No—he’s—good gracious, there he is!” and she fled to her desk.
Emily looked round and saw a notably slender, pale man of middle height with the stoop of a student and restless, light-brown eyes. He was walking rapidly, glancing from side to side and nervously swinging his keys by their chain. He stopped at her desk and smiled—agreeably Emily thought.