'I suppose he was there to hear it.'
'And this is the kind of man who is taking to literature nowadays!' Umbrage cried.
'Oh, Mr. George Frederick has heard a great deal about him,' continued Penny maliciously, 'and expects him to do wonders. He's a self-made man.'
'Oh,' said Umbrage, who could find nothing to object to in that, having risen from comparative obscurity himself.
'Mr. George Frederick,' Penny went on, 'offered him a berth here before Billy Tagg was engaged, but he couldn't come.'
'I suppose,' said Juvenal, with the sarcasm that made him terrible on Fridays, 'the Times offered him something better, or was it the Spectator that wanted an editor?'
'No, it was family matters. His mother or his sister, or—let me see, it was his sister's child—was dependent on him, and could not be left. Something happened to her, though. She's dead, I think, so he's a free man now.'
'Yes, it was his sister's child, and she was found dead,' said the sub-editor, 'on a mountain-side, curiously enough, with George Frederick's letter in her hand offering Angus the appointment.'
Protheroe was foolish to admit that he knew this, for it was news to the foreman, but it tries a man severely to have to listen to news that he could tell better himself. One immediate result of the sub-editor's rashness was that Rob Angus sank several stages in Penny's estimation.
'I dare say he'll turn out a muff,' he said, and flung out of the room, with another intimation that the copy must be cut down.