hem?"

"You're beat to a pappyer mash, and whistlin' to keep your courage."

"Listen to my whistle day after to-morrow--"

But the door had shut on Mr. Neal, who had doubtless read somewhere that
the proper moment to terminate a call is on some telling speech of one's
own.

"I wonder what he's up to," mused Queed.

He brought his chair to horizontal and addressed himself to his
reformatory article. He sharpened his pencil; tangled his great hand
into his hair; and presently put down an opening sentence that fully
satisfied him, his own sternest critic. Then a memory of his visitor
returned to his mind, and he thought pleasurably:

"Plonny knows he is beaten. That's what's the matter with him."

Close observers had often noted, however, that that was very seldom the
matter with Plonny, and bets as to his being beaten were always to be
placed with diffidence and at very long odds. Plonny had no idea
whatever of being beaten on the reformatory measure: on the contrary, it
was the reformatory measure which was to be beaten. Possibly Mr. Neal
was a white-souled patriot chafing under threatened extravagance in an
economy year. Possibly he was impelled by more machine-like exigencies,
such as the need of just that hundred thousand dollars to create a few
nice new berths for the "organization." The man's motives are an
immaterial detail. The sole point worth remembering is that Plonny Neal
had got it firmly in his head that there should be no reformatory
legislation that year.

It was Mr. Neal's business to know men, and he was esteemed a fine
business man. Leaving the assistant editor, he sallied forth to find the
editor. It might have taken Queed an hour to put his hand on West just
then. Plonny did it in less than six minutes.

West was at Semple's (formerly Semple & West's), where he looked in once
a day just to see what the market was doing. This was necessary, as he
sometimes explained, in order that the _Post_'s financial articles might
have that authoritativeness which the paper's position demanded. West
enjoyed the good man-talk at Semple's; the atmosphere of frank, cheery
commercialism made a pleasant relief from the rarer altitudes of the
uplift. He stood chatting gayly with a group of habitues, including some
of the best known men of the town. All greeted Plonny pleasantly, West
cordially. None of our foreign critics can write that the American man
is a moral prude. On two occasions, Plonny had been vindic