hind your back--in fact,
as everybody does talk about you behind your back. I do this on the
theory that you are a serious and honest-minded man, sincerely
interested in learning the truth about yourself and your failures, so
that you may correct them. If you are interested only in having your
vanity fed by flattering fictions, please say so right now. I have no
time," she said, hardly able for her life to suppress a smile, "for
butterflies and triflers."

_Butterflies and triflers!_ Mr. Queed, proprietor of the famous
Schedule, a butterfly and a trifler!

He said in a muffled voice: "Proceed."

"Since an editorial writer," said Sharlee, seating herself and beginning
with a paragraph as neat as a public speaker's, "must be able, as his
first qualification, to interest the common people, it is manifest that
he must be interested in the common people. He must feel his bond of
humanity with them, sympathize with them, like them, love them. This is
the great secret of Colonel Cowles's success as an editor. A fine
gentleman by birth, breeding, and tradition, he is yet always a human
being among human beings. All his life he has been doing things with and
for the people. He went all through the war, and you might have thought
the whole world depended on him, the way he went up Cemetery Ridge on
the 3rd of July, 1863. He was shot all to pieces, but they patched him
together, and the next year there he was back in the fighting around
Petersburg. After the war he was a leader against the carpet-baggers,
and if this State is peaceful and prosperous and comfortable for you to
live in now, it is because of what men like him and my father did a
generation ago. When he took the _Post_ he went on just the same,
working and thinking and fighting for men and with men, and all in the
service of the people. I suppose, of course, his views through all these
years have not always been sound, but they have always been honest and
honorable, sensible, manly, and sweet. And they have always had a
practical relation with the life of the people. The result is that he
has thousands and thousands of readers who feel that their day has been
wanting in something unless they have read what he has to say. There is
Colonel Cowles--Does this interest you, Mr. Queed? If not, I need not
weary us both by continuing."

He again requested her, in the briefest possible way, to proceed.

"Well! There is Colonel Cowles, whom you presume to despise, because