fitfully from business to Blaines College;
from the college to the _Post_; before long he would flutter on from the
_Post_ to something else--always falling short, always secretly
disappointed, everywhere a failure as a man, though few might know it
but himself. West's trouble, in fact, was that he was not a man at all.
He was weakest where a real man is strongest. He was merely a chameleon
taking his color from whatever he happened to light upon; a handsome
boat which could never get anywhere because it had no rudder; an
ornamental butterfly driving aimlessly before the nearest breeze. He
meant well, in a general way, but his good intentions proved descending
paving-stones because he was constitutionally incapable of meaning
anything very hard.

West had had everything in the beginning except money; and he had the
faculty of making all of that he wanted. Queed--she found that name
still clinging to him in her thoughts--had had nothing in the beginning
except his fearless honesty. In everything else that a man should he, he
had seemed to her painfully destitute. But because through everything he
had held unflinchingly to his honesty, he had been steadily climbing the
heights. He had passed West long ago, because their faces were set in
opposite directions. West had had the finest distinctions of honor
carefully instilled into him from his birth. Queed had deduced his, raw,
from his own unswerving honesty. And the first acid test of a real
situation showed that West's honor was only burnished and decorated
dross, while Queed's, which he had made himself, was as fine gold. In
that test, all superficial trappings were burned and shriveled away; men
were made to show their men's colors; and the "queer little man with the
queer little name" had instantly cast off his resplendent superior
because contact with his superior's dishonesty was degrading to him. Yet
in the same breath, he had allowed his former chief to foist off that
dishonesty upon his own clean shoulders, and borne the detestable burden
without demand for sympathy or claim for gratitude. And this was the
measure of how, as Queed had climbed by his honesty, his whole nature
had been strengthened and refined. For if he had begun as the most
unconscious and merciless of egoists, who could sacrifice little Fifi to
his comfort without a tremor, he had ended with the supreme act of
purest altruism: the voluntary sacrifice of himself to save a man whom
in his heart he