Edgar Braine had proved to himself that he possessed superior capacities. He had long entertained that opinion of his endowment, but his caution in self-estimate was so great that he had been slower than any of his acquaintances to accept the fact as indisputably proved.
It had been proved, however, and that was cause enough for rejoicing, to a mind which had tortured itself from boyhood with unutterable longings for that power over men which superior intellect gives,—a mind that had dreamed high dreams of the employment of such power for human progress.
His was not an ambition achieved. It was that immeasurably more joyous thing, an ambition in sure process of achievement.
But this was not his only cause of joy. Love, as well as life, had smiled upon him, and the woman who had subdued all that was noblest in him to that which was still nobler in her, was presently to be his wife.
And so Edgar Braine's heart sang merrily within him as he strode through the cottonwood-bordered streets toward his editorial work-shop.
He entered the composing-room in front, and greeted the foreman with even more of cordiality than was his custom, though his custom was a cordial one.
He tried not to observe that Mikey Hagin, the Spartan-souled apprentice of the establishment, was complacently burning a hole in the palm of his hand, in a heroic endeavor to hide the fact that he had been smoking a cigarette in risk of that instant discharge which Braine had threatened as the fore-ordained punishment of that crime, if he should ever catch the precocious youth committing it again.
He saw the cigarette, of course,—it was his habit to see things,—and the blue wreath floating upward from the hand in which a hasty attempt had been made to conceal it, was perfectly apparent. But his humor was much too joyous for him to enforce the penalty, though he had decreed it with a fixed purpose to enforce it. Somehow the grief of Mrs. Hagin, Mikey's mother and Braine's laundress, at the discharge of her not over hopeful son, was much more vividly present to his imagination this morning than when he had promulgated the decree. He was too happy a man to be willing to make any human being needlessly unhappy.
And yet he was too strict a disciplinarian to overlook the offence entirely. He turned to the boy and said:
"It is lucky for you that I didn't catch you smoking the cigarette you have in your hand. As it seems to be smoking you instead, I don't so much mind."