"Well?" he called, annoyed.
Emma came in with a card. The name, at which the young man barely glanced, conveyed nothing to him.
"Well? What does he want?"
Emma did not know.
"Oh!" said Mr. Queed, irritably—"tell him to come up, if he must."
The Post director came up—two flights; he knocked; was curtly bidden to enter; did so.
He stepped into one of the smallest rooms he had ever seen in his life; about nine by five-and-a-half, he thought. A tiny single bed ran along one side of it; jammed against the foot of the bed was a tiny table. A tiny chair stood at the table; behind the chair stood a tiny bureau; beside the bureau, the tiniest little iron wash-stand in the world. In the chair sat a man, not tiny, indeed, but certainly nobody's prize giant. He sat in a kind of whirling tempest of books and papers, and he rode absorbedly in the whirlwind and majestically directed the storm.
West was intensely interested. "Mr. Queed?" he asked, from just inside the door.
"Yes," said the other, not looking up. "What can I do for you?"
West burst out laughing; he couldn't help it.