“It is a pity, my dear sir,” he went on, “that you should waste your talents. Why roll in the muck? Why can’t you learn not to weary me with this weekly inspection of insanity?”
Gammell’s eyes became pale green, his cheeks an unhealthy bluish gray. He cast about desperately for a weapon with which to strike and strike home. Emily was in his mind and, while he had not the faintest notion that Stilson cared for her or she for him, he remembered Stilson’s emphatic compliments on her work. “Perhaps if I were supplied with a more capable staff, we might get together articles that would be intelligent as well as striking. But what can I do, handicapped by such a staff, by such useless ornamentals as—well, as your Miss Bromfield.”
“That reminds me.” Stilson recovered his outward self-control at once. “I notice she has little in the magazine nowadays. Instead of exhausting yourself on such character-destroying stuff as this,” with a disdainful gesture toward the rejected article, “you might be arranging for features such as she used to do and do very well.”
“She’s not of the slightest use here any longer.” Gammell shrugged his shoulders and lifted his eyebrows. “She’s of no use to the paper. And as the present Sunday editor doesn’t happen to fancy her, why, she’s of no use at all—now.”
With a movement so swift that Gammell had no time to resist or even to understand, Stilson whirled him from his chair, and flung him upon the floor as if he were some insect that had shown sudden venom and must be crushed under the heel without delay.
“Don’t kill me!” screamed Gammell, in a frenzy of physical fear, as he looked up at Stilson’s face ablaze with the homicidal mania. “For God’s sake, Stilson, don’t murder me!”
The door opened and several frightened faces appeared there. Stilson, distracted from his purpose, turned on the intruders. “Close that door!” he commanded. “Back to your work!” and he thrust the door into its frame. “Now, get up!” he said to Gammell. “You are one of those vile creatures that are brought into the world—I don’t know how, but I’m sure without the interposition of a mother. Get up and brush yourself. And hereafter see that you keep your foul mind from your lips and eyes.”
He stalked away, his footsteps ringing through the silent Sunday room where all were bending over their work in the effort to obliterate themselves. Within an hour the story of “the fight” was racing up and down Park Row and in and out of every newspaper office. But no one could explain it. And to this day Emily does not know why Gammell gave her late that afternoon the best assignment she had had in three months.
In the following week she received a letter from Burnham, general manager of Trescott, Anderson and Company, the publishers in Twenty-third Street. It was an invitation to call “at your earliest convenience in reference to a matter which we hope will interest you.” She went in the morning on her way downtown. Mr. Burnham was most polite—a twitching little man, inclined to be silly in his embarrassment, talking rapidly and catching his breath between sentences.
“We are making several changes in the conduct of our magazines,” said he. “We wish to get some young blood—newspaper blood, in fact, into them. We wish to make them less—less prosy, more—more up-to-date. No—not ‘yellow’—by no means—nothing like that. Still, we feel that we ought to be a little—yes—livelier.”