He looked at her with boundless admiration. "His one reader!"
"There are two of us, if you please. I think of getting up a club—Associated Sons and Daughters of Mr. Queed's Faithful Followers; President, Me. I'll make the other member Secretary, for he is experienced in that work. He's at present Secretary of the Tax Reform League in New York. Did Colonel Cowles show you the wonderful letter that came from him, asking the name of the man who was writing the Post's masterly tax articles, et cetera, et cetera?"
"No—really! But tell me, how have you, as President, enjoyed them?"
"I haven't understood a single word in any of them. Where on earth did he dig up his fearful vocabulary? Yet it is the plain duty of both of us to read these articles: you as one of his employers, I as the shrewd landlady's agent who keeps a watchful eye upon the earning power of her boarders."
West mused. "He has a wonderful genius for crushing all the interest out of any subject he touches, hasn't he? Yet manifestly the first duty of an editorial is to get itself read. How old do you think he is?"
"Oh—anywhere from twenty-five to—forty-seven."
"He'll be twenty-four this month. I see him sometimes at the office, you know, where he still treats me like an intrusive subscription agent. In some ways, he is undoubtedly the oldest man in the world. In another way he hasn't any age at all. Spiritually he is unborn—he simply doesn't exist at all. I diagnose his complaint as ingrowing egoism of a singularly virulent variety."
It was beyond Sharlee's power to controvert this diagnosis. Mr. Queed had in fact impressed her as the most frankly and grossly self-centred person she had ever seen in her life. But unlike West, her uppermost feeling in regard to him was a strong sense of pity. She knew things about his life that West did not know and probably never would. For though the little Doctor of Mrs. Paynter's had probably not intended to give her a confidence, and certainly had no right to do so, she had thus regarded what he said to her in the dining-room that night, and of his pathetic situation in regard to a father she never meant to say a word to anybody.
"I sized him up for a remarkable man," said she, "when I saw the wonderful way he sat upon his hat that afternoon. Don't you remember? He struck me then as the most natural, unconscious, and direct human being I ever saw—don't you think that?—and now think of his powers of concentration. All his waking time, except what he gives to the Post, goes to that awful book of his. He is ridiculous now because his theory of life is ridiculous. But suppose it popped into his head some day to switch all that directness and concentrated energy in some other direction. Don't you think he might be rather a formidable young person?"
West conceded that there might be something in that. And happening to glance across the flower-sweet table at the moment, he was adroitly detached and re-attached by the superbly "finished" Miss Avery.