nnual obligation, to boot. An excellent thing
in itself, but a most unreasonable request of an economy session, said
the organization leaders. In fact, this hundred thousand dollars
happened to be precisely the hundred thousand dollars they needed to
lubricate "the organization," and discharge, by some choice new
positions, a few honorable obligations incurred during the campaign.

Now it was written in the recesses of the assistant editor's being,
those parts of him which he never thought of mentioning to anybody, that
the reformatory bill must pass. Various feelings had gradually stiffened
an early general approval into a rock-ribbed resolve. It was on a
closely allied theme that he had first won his editorial spurs--the
theme of Klinker's "blaggards," who made reformatories necessary. That
was one thing: a kind of professional sentiment which the sternest
scientist need not be ashamed to acknowledge. And then, beyond that, his
many talks with Klinker had invested the campaign for the reformatory
with a warmth of meaning which was without precedent in his experience.
This was, in fact, his first personal contact with the suffering and sin
of the world, his first grapple with a social problem in the raw. Two
years before, when he had offered to write an article on this topic for
the Assistant Secretary of Charities, his interest in a reformatory had
been only the scientific interest which the trained sociologist feels in
all the enginery of social reform. But now this institution had become
indissolubly connected in Queed's mind with the case of Eva Bernheimer,
whom Buck Klinker knew, Eva Bernheimer who was "in trouble" at sixteen,
and had now "dropped out." A reformatory had become in his thought a
living instrument to catch the Eva Bernheimers of this world, and
effectually prevent them from dropping out.

And apart from all this, here was the first chance he had ever had to do
a service for Sharlee Weyland.

However, the bill stuck obstinately in committee. Now the session was
more than half over, February was nearly gone, and there it still stuck.
And when it finally came out, it was evidently going to be a toss of a
coin whether it would be passed by half a dozen votes, or beaten by an
equal number. But there was not the slightest doubt that the great
majority of the voters, so far as they were interested in it at all,
wanted it passed, and the tireless _Post_ was prodding the committee
every other day, observin