Colfax was small, wiry, excitable,
with enough energy to explode a cartridge by yelling at it. He was
eager, vainglorious, in many respects brilliant. He wanted to shine in
the world, and he did not know how to do it as yet exactly.

The two shook hands firmly.

Some three months later Colfax was duly elected director and president,
and the same meeting that elected him president elected Florence J.
White vice-president. The latter was for clearing out all the old
elements and letting in new blood. Colfax was for going slow, until he
could see for himself what he wanted to do. One or two men were
eliminated at once, an old circulation man and an old advertising man.
In six months, while they were still contemplating additional
changes and looking for new men, Colfax senior died, and the
Swinton-Scudder-Davis Company, or at least Mr. Colfax's control of it,
was willed to Hiram. So he sat there, accidentally president, and in
full charge, wondering how he should make it a great success, and
Florence J. White was his henchman and sworn ally.

At the time that Colfax first heard of Eugene he had been in charge of
the Swinton-Scudder-Davis Company (which he was planning to
reincorporate as "The United Magazines Corporation") for three years. He
had made a number of changes, some radical, some conservative. He had
put in an advertising man whom he was now finding unsatisfactory, and
had made changes in the art and editorial departments which were more
the result of the suggestions of others, principally of White, than the
thoughts of his own brain. Martin W. Davis had retired. He was old and
sick, and unwilling to ruminate in a back-room position. Such men as the
editor of the _National Review_, _Swinton's Magazine_, and _Scudder's
Weekly_ were the only figures of importance about the place, and they
were now of course immensely subsidiary to Hiram Colfax and Florence
White.

The latter had introduced a rather hard, bitter atmosphere into the
place. He had been raised under difficult conditions himself in a back
street in Brooklyn, and had no sympathy with the airs and intellectual
insipidities which characterized the editorial and literary element
which filled the place. He had an Irishman's love of organization and
politics, but far and away above that he had an Irishman's love of
power. Because of the trick he had scored in winning the favor of Hiram
Colfax at the time when the tremendous affairs of the concern were in