olum was about to retort, when he was anticipated by a new speaker.
It was Quill, the journalist, who has long thin fingers and
indigestion. At meals he pecks suspiciously at his plate, and he eats
food substitutes. Quill runs a financial supplement, or something of
that kind, to a daily paper. He always knows whether Steel is strong
and whether Copper is up or down. If you call on him at his office, he
glances at you for a moment before he knows you. Yet in his slippers
he grows human.

"I like the country, too," he interposed, "and no one ever said that I
am sentimental." He tapped his head. "I'm as hard as nails up here."
Quill cracked his knuckles in a disagreeable habit he has, and
continued: "I have a shack on the West Shore, and I go there
week-ends. My work is so confining that if I didn't get to the country
once in a while, I would play out in a jiffy. I'm a nervous frazzle--a
nervous frazzle--by Saturday noon. But I lie on the grass all Sunday,
and if nobody snaps at me and I am let alone, by Monday morning I am
fit again."

"You must be like Antaeus."

This remark came from Wurm, our host. Wurm is a bookish fellow who
wears great rimmed glasses. He spends much of his time in company
thinking up apposite quotations and verifying them. He has worn out
two Bartlett's. Wurm is also addicted to maps and dictionaries, and is
a great reader of special articles. Consequently his mind is a pound
for stray collarless facts; or rather, in its variety of contents, it
more closely resembles a building contractor's back yard--odd
salvage--rejected doors--a job of window-frames--a pile of bricks for
chipping--discarded plumbing--broken junk gathered here and there.
Mr. Aust himself, a building contractor who once lived on our
street--a man of no broad fame--quite local--surely unknown to
you--did not collect so wide a rubbish.

However, despite these qualities, Wurm is rather a pleasant and
harmless bit of cobweb. For a livelihood, he sits in a bank behind a
grill. At noon he eats his lunch in his cage, and afterwards with a
rubber band he snaps at the flies. In the hunting season he kills in a
day as many as a dozen of these pests' and ranges them in his pen
tray. On Saturday afternoon he rummages in Malkan's and the
second-hand bookshops along Fourth Avenue. To see Wurm in his most
characteristic pose, is to see him on a ladder, with one leg
outstretched, far off his balance, fumbling for a title with his
finger tip