The Count de Lloseta and John Craik were sitting together in the editorial room of the Commentator.
It was a quiet room, with double windows and a permanent odour of tobacco smoke. An empty teacup stood on the table by John Craik’s elbow.
“Name of God!” Cipriani de Lloseta had ejaculated when he saw it. “At eleven o’clock in the morning!”
“Must stir the brain up,” was the reply.
“I would not do it with a teaspoon,” De Lloseta had answered, and then he sat down to correct the proof of Eve’s fourth article on “Spain and Spanish Life.”
They had been sitting thus together for half an hour in friendly silence, only broken by an occasional high-class Spanish anathema hurled at the head of the printer.
“A dog’s trade!” ejaculated De Lloseta at last, leaning back and throwing down his pen, “a dog’s trade, my friend!”
“It is mine,” replied Craik, without looking up. In fiction he was celebrated for a certain smartness of dialogue. His printed conversations were pretty displays of social sword-play. It had become a sort of habit with him to thrust and parry quickly; but the sudden smile on his lined face, the kindly glance from behind the spectacles, always took away the sting and demonstrated that it was mere “copy,” to fill up the dull columns of life and throw in a sparkle here and there.
“Have you finished?” he inquired.
“Yes, thank Heaven! I was not intended for a literary calling. That is number four, and I am not paid--I am not paid; there lies the sting.”