"What's the matter with me?" asked Banneker.

Mr. Gordon played a thoughtful tattoo upon his fleshy knuckles with the letter-opener. "Nothing. Aren't you satisfied?"

"No. Are you?"

"You've had your raise, and fairly early. Unless you had been worth it, you wouldn't have had it."

"Am I doing what you expected of me?"

"Not exactly. But you're developing into a sure, reliable reporter."

"A routine man," commented Banneker.

"After all, the routine man is the backbone of the office." Mr. Gordon executed a fantasia on his thumb. "Would you care to try a desk job?" he asked, peering at Banneker over his glasses.

"I'd rather run a trolley car. There's more life in it."

"Do you _see_ life, in your work, Mr. Banneker?"

"See it? I feel it. Sometimes I think it's going to flatten me out like a steam-roller."

"Then why not write it?"

"It isn't news: not what I see."

"Perhaps not. Perhaps it's something else. But if it's there and we can get a gleam of it into the paper, we'll crowd news out to make a place for it. You haven't been reading The Ledger I'm afraid."

"Like a Bible."

"Not to good purpose, then. What do you think of Tommy Burt's stuff?"

"It's funny; some of it. But I couldn't do it to save my job."

"Nobody can do it but Burt, himself. Possibly you could learn something from it, though."

"Burt doesn't like it, himself. He told me it was all formula; that you could always get a laugh out of people about something they'd been taught to consider funny, like a red nose or a smashed hat. He's got a list of Sign Posts on the Road to Humor."

"The cynicism of twenty-eight," smiled the tolerant Mr. Gordon. "Don't let yourself be inoculated."

"Mr. Gordon," said Banneker doggedly; "I'm not doing the kind of work I expected to do here."

"You can hardly expect the star jobs until you've made yourself a star man."

Banneker flushed. "I'm not complaining of the way I've been treated.

I've had a square enough deal. The trouble is with me. I want to know whether I ought to stick or quit."

"If you quit, what would you do?"

"I haven't a notion," replied the other with an indifference which testified to a superb, instinctive self-confidence. "Something."

"Do it here. I think you'll come along all right."

"But what's wrong with me?" persisted Banneker.

"Too much restraint. A rare fault. You haven't let yourself out." For a space he drummed and mused. Suddenly a knuckle cracked loudly. Mr.

Gordon flinched and glared at it, startled as if it had offended him by interrupting a train of thought. "Here!" said he brusquely. "There's a Sewer-Cleaners' Association picnic to-morrow. They're going to put in half their day inspecting the Stimson Tunnel under the North River.

Pretty idea; isn't it? Suppose I ask Mr. Greenough to send you out on the story. And I'd like a look at it when you turn it in."

Banneker worked hard on his report of the picnic; hard and self-consciously. Tommy Burt would, he knew, have made a "scream" of it, for tired business men to chuckle over on their way downtown. Pursuant to what he believed Mr. Gordon wanted, Banneker strove conscientiously to be funny with these human moles, who, having twelve hours of freedom for sunshine and air, elected to spend half of it in a hole bigger, deeper, and more oppressive than any to which their noisome job called them. The result was five painfully mangled sheets which presently went to the floor, torn in strips. After that Banneker reported the picnic as he saw, felt, and smelt it. It was a somber bit of writing, not without its subtleties and shrewd perceptions; quite unsuitable to the columns of The Ledger, in which it failed to appear. But Mr. Gordon read it twice. He advised Banneker not to be discouraged.

Banneker was deeply discouraged. He wanted to resign.

Perhaps he would nave resigned, if old Mynderse Verschoyle had not died at eight o'clock on the morning of the day when Banneker was the earliest man to report at the office. A picturesque character, old Mynderse, who had lived for forty-five years with his childless wife in the ancient house on West 10th Street, and for the final fifteen years had not addressed so much as a word to her. She had died three months before; and now he had followed, apparently, from what Banneker learned in an interview with the upset and therefore voluble secretary of the dead man, because, having no hatred left on which to center his life, he had nothing else to live for. Banneker wrote the story of that hatred, rigid, ceremonious, cherished like a rare virtue until it filled two lives; and he threw about it the atmosphere of the drear and divided old house. At the end, the sound of the laughter of children at play in the street.

The article appeared word for word as he had written it. That noon Tommy Burt, the funny man, drawing down his hundred-plus a week on space, came over and sat on Banneker's desk, and swung his legs and looked at him mournfully and said:

"You've broken through your shell at last."

"Did you like it?" asked Banneker.

"Like it! My God, if I could write like that! But what's the use! Never in the world."

"Oh, that's nonsense," returned Banneker, pleased. "Of course you can.

But what's the rest of your 'if'?"

"I wouldn't be wasting my time here. The magazines for me."

"Is that better?"

"Depends on what you're after. For a man who wants to write, it's better, of course."

"Why?"

"Gives him a larger audience. No newspaper story is remembered overnight except by newspaper men. And they don't matter."

"Why don't they matter?" Banneker was surprised again, this time rather disagreeably.

"It's a little world. There isn't much substance to it. Take that Verschoyle stuff of yours; that's literature, that is! But you'll never hear of it again after next week. A few people here will remember it, and it'll help you to your next raise. But after you've got that, and, after that, your lift onto space, where are you?"

The abruptly confidential approach of Tommy Burt flattered Banneker with the sense that by that one achievement of the Verschoyle story he had attained a new status in the office. Later there came out from the inner sanctum where sat the Big Chief, distilling venom and wit in equal parts for the editorial page, a special word of approval. But this pleased the recipient less than the praise of his peers in the city room.

After that first talk, Burt came back to Banneker's desk from time to time, and once took him to dinner at "Katie's," the little German restaurant around the corner. Burt was given over to a restless and inoffensively egoistic pessimism.

"Look at me. I'm twenty-eight and making a good income. When I was twenty-three, I was making nearly as much. When I'm thirty-eight, where shall I be?"

"Can't you keep on making it?" asked Banneker.

"Doubtful. A fellow goes stale on the kind of stuff I do. And if I do keep on? Five to six thousand is fine now. It won't be so much ten years from now. That's the hell of this game; there's no real chance in it."