"Well, we'll try that, anyhow."

Presley had not time to readjust his perspective to this new point of
view of the President of the P. and S. W. before the assistant manager
had withdrawn. Shelgrim wrote a few memoranda on his calendar pad, and
signed a couple of letters before turning his attention to Presley. At
last, he looked up and fixed the young man with a direct, grave glance.
He did not smile. It was some time before he spoke. At last, he said:

"Well, sir."

Presley advanced and took a chair nearer at hand. Shelgrim turned and
from his desk picked up and consulted Presley's card. Presley observed
that he read without the use of glasses.

"You," he said, again facing about, "you are the young man who wrote the
poem called 'The Toilers.'"

"Yes, sir."

"It seems to have made a great deal of talk. I've read it, and I've seen
the picture in Cedarquist's house, the picture you took the idea from."

Presley, his senses never more alive, observed that, curiously enough,
Shelgrim did not move his body. His arms moved, and his head, but
the great bulk of the man remained immobile in its place, and as the
interview proceeded and this peculiarity emphasised itself, Presley
began to conceive the odd idea that Shelgrim had, as it were, placed his
body in the chair to rest, while his head and brain and hands went
on working independently. A saucer of shelled filberts stood near his
elbow, and from time to time he picked up one of these in a great thumb
and forefinger and put it between his teeth.

"I've seen the picture called 'The Toilers,'" continued Shelgrim, "and
of the two, I like the picture better than the poem."

"The picture is by a master," Presley hastened to interpose.

"And for that reason," said Shelgrim, "it leaves nothing more to be
said. You might just as well have kept quiet. There's only one best way
to say anything. And what has made the picture of 'The Toilers' great is
that the artist said in it the BEST that could be said on the subject."

"I had never looked at it in just that light," observed Presley. He
was confused, all at sea, embarrassed. What he had expected to find in
Shelgrim, he could not have exactly said. But he had been prepared
to come upon an ogre, a brute, a terrible man of blood and iron, and
instead had discovered a sentimentalist and an art critic. No standards
of measurement in his mental equipment would apply to the actual man,
and it began to dawn upon him that po