ged him
once with being guilty of emotion when roaring round the den with
the Son of Anak pickaback. Not so, he held. Could he not cuddle a
sense-delight for the problem's sake?

He was elusive. A man who intermingled nameless argot with polysyllabic
and technical terms, he would seem sometimes the veriest criminal, in
speech, face, expression, everything; at other times the cultured and
polished gentleman, and again, the philosopher and scientist. But
there was something glimmering; there which I never caught--flashes
of sincerity, of real feeling, I imagined, which were sped ere I could
grasp; echoes of the man he once was, possibly, or hints of the man
behind the mask. But the mask he never lifted, and the real man we never
knew.

"But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?" I
asked. "Never mind Loria. Tell me."

"Well, if I must." He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.

"In a town that shall be nameless," he began, "in fact, a city of fifty
thousand, a fair and beautiful city wherein men slave for dollars and
women for dress, an idea came to me. My front was prepossessing, as
fronts go, and my pockets empty. I had in recollection a thought I once
entertained of writing a reconciliation of Kant and Spencer. Not that
they are reconcilable, of course, but the room offered for scientific
satire--"

I waved my hand impatiently, and he broke off.

"I was just tracing my mental states for you, in order to show the
genesis of the action," he explained. "However, the idea came. What
was the matter with a tramp sketch for the daily press? The
Irreconcilability of the Constable and the Tramp, for instance? So I hit
the drag (the drag, my dear fellow, is merely the street), or the high
places, if you will, for a newspaper office. The elevator whisked me
into the sky, and Cerberus, in the guise of an anaemic office boy,
guarded the door. Consumption, one could see it at a glance; nerve,
Irish, colossal; tenacity, undoubted; dead inside the year.

"'Pale youth,' quoth I, 'I pray thee the way to the sanctum-sanctorum,
to the Most High Cock-a-lorum.'

"He deigned to look at me, scornfully, with infinite weariness.

"'G'wan an' see the janitor. I don't know nothin' about the gas.'

"'Nay, my lily-white, the editor.'

"'Wich editor?' he snapped like a young bullterrier. 'Dramatic?
Sportin'? Society? Sunday? Weekly? Daily? Telegraph? Local? News?
Editorial? Wich?'

"Which, I did