act, for the Schedule had lost
its first rigid precision--to the Sciences of Physical Culture and
Human Intercourse; all the rest to the Science of Sciences. Glorious
mornings, and hardly less glorious nights, he gave, day after day, week
after week, to the great book; and because of his astonishingly enhanced
vitality, he made one hour tell now as an hour and a half had told in
the period of the establishment of the Scriptorium.

And now, without warning and prematurely, the jade Fortune had pitched a
bomb at this new Revised Schedule of his, leaving him to decide whether
he would patch up the pieces or not. And he had decided that he would
not patch them up. Colonel Cowles was dead. The directors of the _Post_
might choose him to succeed the Colonel, or they might not. But if they
did choose him, he had finally made up his mind that he would accept the
election.

In his attitude toward the newspaper, Queed was something like those
eminent fellow-scientists of his who have set out to "expose"
spiritualism and "the occult," and have ended as the most gullible
customers of the most dubious of "mediums." The idea of being editor for
its own sake, which he had once jeered and flouted, he had gradually
come to consider with large respect. The work drew him amazingly; it was
applied science of a peculiarly fascinating sort. And in the six days of
the Colonel's illness in May, when he had full charge of the editorial
page--and again now--he had an exhilarating consciousness of personal
power which lured him, oddly, more than any sensation he had ever had in
his life.

No inducements of this sort, alone, could ever have drawn him from his
love. However, his love was safe, in any case. If they made him editor,
they would give him an assistant. He would keep his mornings for
himself--four hours a day. In the long vigil last night, he had threshed
the whole thing out. On a four-hour schedule he could finish his book in
four years and a half more:--an unprecedentedly early age to have
completed so monumental a work. And who could say that in thus making
haste slowly, he would not have acquired a breadth of outlook, and
closer knowledge of the practical conditions of life, which would be
advantageously reflected in the Magnum Opus itself?

The young man sat at his table, the sheaf of yellow sheets which made up
the chapter he was now working on ready under his hand. Around him were
his reference books, his note-books, his penci