Howard was now thirty-two. He was still trying for the editorial staff; but in the last month only five of his articles had been printed to twenty-three thrown away. A national campaign was coming on and the News-Record was taking a political stand that seemed to him sound and right. For the first time he tried political editorials.

The cause aroused his passion for justice, for democratic equality and the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet direct—these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling, rewriting again and again, recasting of sentences, careful balancing of words for exact shades of meaning.

“I shall never learn to write,” had been his complaint of himself to himself for years. And in these days it seemed to him that he was farther from a good style than ever. His standards had risen, were rising; he feared that his power of accomplishment was failing. Therefore his heart sank and his face paled when an office boy told him that Mr. Malcolm wished to see him.

“I suppose it’s to tell me not to annoy him with any more of my attempts,” he thought. “Well, anyway, I’ve had the benefit of the work. I’ll try a novel next.”

“Take a seat,” said Mr. Malcolm with an absent nod. “Just a moment, if you please.”

On a chair beside him was the remnant of what had been a huge up-piling of newspapers—the exchanges that had come in during the past twenty-four hours. The Exchange Editor had been through them and Mr. Malcolm was reading “to feel the pulse of the country” and also to make sure that nothing of importance had been overlooked.

On the floor were newspapers by the score, thrown about tumultuously. Mr. Malcolm would seize a paper from the unread heap, whirl it open and send his glance and his long pointed nose tearing down one column and up another, and so from page to page. It took less than a minute for him to finish and filing away great sixteen page dailies. A few seconds sufficed for the smaller papers. Occasionally he took his long shears and with a skilful twist cut out a piece from the middle of a page and laid it and the shears upon the table with a single motion.

“Now, Mr. Howard.” Malcolm sent the last paper to increase the chaos on the floor and faced about in his revolving chair. “How would you like to come up here?”

Howard looked at him in amazement. “You mean——”

“We want you to join the editorial staff. Mr. Walker has married him a rich wife and is going abroad to do literary work, which means that he is going to do nothing. Will you come?”

“It is what I have been working for.”

“And very hard you have worked.” Mr. Malcolm’s cold face relaxed into a half-friendly, half-satirical smile. “After you’d been sending up articles for a fortnight, I knew you’d make it. You went about it systematically. An intelligent plan, persisted in, is hard to beat in this world of laggards and hap-hazard strugglers.”

“And I was on the point of giving up—that is, giving up this particular ambition,” Howard confessed.

“Yes, I saw it in your articles—a certain pessimism and despondency. You show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent quality—but dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working evenly without regard to his feelings or physical condition. The night my oldest child died—I was editor of a country newspaper—I wrote my leaders as usual. I never had written better. You can be absolute master inside, if you will. You can learn to use your feelings when they’re helpful and to shut them off when they hinder.”

“But don’t you think that temperament——”

“Temperament—that’s one of the subtlest forms of self-excuse. However, the place is yours. The salary is a hundred and twenty-five a week—an advance of about twelve hundred a year, I believe, on your average downstairs. Can you begin soon?”

“Immediately,” said Howard, “if the City Editor is satisfied.”

An office boy showed him to his room—a mere hole-in-the-wall with just space for a table-desk, a small table, a case of shelves for books of reference, and two chairs. The one window overlooked the lower end of Manhattan Island—the forest of business buildings peaked with the Titan-tenements of financial New York. Their big, white plumes of smoke and steam were waving in the wind and reflecting in pale pink the crimson of the setting sun.

Howard had his first taste of the intoxication of triumph, his first deep inspiration of ambition. He recalled his arrival in New York, his timidity, his dread lest he should be unable to make a living—“Poor boy,” they used to say at home, “he will have to be supported. He is too much of a dreamer.” He remembered his explorations of those now familiar streets—how acutely conscious he had been that they were paved with stone, walled with stone, roofed with a stony sky, peopled with faces and hearts of stone. How miserably insignificant he had felt!

And all these years he had been almost content to be one of the crowd, like them exerting himself barely enough to provide himself with the essentials of existence. Like them, he had given no real thought to the morrow. And now, with comparatively little labour, he had put himself in the way to become a master, a director of the enormous concentrated energies summed up in the magic word New York.

The key to the situation was—work, incessant, self-improving, self-developing. “And it is the key to happiness also,” he thought. “Work and sleep—the two periods of unconsciousness of self—are the two periods of happiness.”

His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from the outside, seemed dull and monotonous. Viewed from his stand-point of acquisition, of achievement, it was just the reverse.

The mind soon adapts itself to and enjoys any mental routine which exercises it. The only difficulty is in forming the habit of the routine.

Howard was greatly helped by his natural bent toward editorial writing. The idea of discussing important questions each day with a vast multitude as an audience stirred his imagination and aroused his instincts for helping on the great world-task of elevating the race. This enthusiasm pleased and also amused his cynical chief.

“You believe in things?” Malcolm said to him after they had become well acquainted. “Well, it is an admirable quality—but dangerous. You will need careful editing. Your best plan is to give yourself up to your belief while you are writing—then to edit yourself in cold blood. That is the secret of success, of great success in any line, business, politics, a profession—enthusiasm, carefully revised and edited.”

“It is difficult to be cold blooded when one is in earnest.”

“True,” Malcolm answered, “and there is the danger. My own enthusiasms are confined to the important things—food, clothing and shelter. It seems to me that the rest is largely a matter of taste, training and time of life. But don’t let me discourage you. I only suggest that you may have to guard against believing so intensely that you produce the impression of being an impracticable, a fanatic. Be cautious always; be especially cautious when you are cocksure you’re right. Unadulterated truth always arouses suspicion in the unaccustomed public. It has the alarming tastelessness of distilled water.”

Howard was acute enough to separate the wisdom from the cynicism of his chief. He saw the lesson of moderation. “You have failed, my very able chief,” he said to himself, “because you have never believed intensely enough to move you to act. You have attached too much importance to the adulteration—the folly and the humbug. And here you are, still only a critic, destructive but never constructive.”

At first his associates were much amused by his intensity. But as he learned to temper and train his enthusiasm they grew to respect both his ability and his character. Before a year had passed they were feeling the influence of his force—his trained, informed mind, made vigorous by principles and ideals.

Malcolm had the keen appreciation of a broad mind for this honest, intelligent energy. He used the editorial “blue-pencil” for alteration and condensation with the hand of a master. He cut away Howard’s crudities, toned down and so increased his intensity, and pointed it with the irony and satire necessary to make it carry far and penetrate easily.

Malcolm was at once giving Howard a reputation greater than he deserved and training him to deserve it.

In the office next to Howard’s sat Segur, a bachelor of forty-five who took life as a good-humoured jest and amused his leisure with the New Yorkers who devote a life of idleness to a nervous flight from boredom. Howard interested Segur who resolved to try to draw him out of his seclusion.

“I’m having some people to dinner at the Waldorf on Thursday,” he said, looking in at the door. “Won’t you join us?”

“I’d be glad to,” replied Howard, casting about for an excuse for declining. “But I’m afraid I’d ruin your dinner. I haven’t been out for years. I’ve been too busy to make friends or, rather, acquaintances.”

“A great mistake. You ought to see more of people.”

“Why? Can they tell me anything that I can’t learn from newspapers or books more accurately and without wasting so much time? I’d like to know the interesting people and to see them in their interesting moments. But I can’t afford to hunt for them through the wilderness of nonentities and wait for them to become interesting.”

“But you get amusement, relaxation. Then too, it’s first-hand study of life.”

“I’m not sure of that. Yawning is not a very attractive kind of relaxation, is it? And as for study of life, eight years of reporting gave me more of that than I could assimilate. And it was study of realities, not of pretenses. As I remember them, ‘respectable’ people are all about the same, whether in their vices or in their virtues. They are cut from a few familiar, ‘old reliable’ patterns. No, I don’t think there is much to be learned from respectability on dress parade.”

“You’ll be amused on Thursday. You must come. I’m counting on you.”

Howard accepted—cordially as he could not refuse decently. Yet he had a presentiment or a shyness or an impatience at the interruption of his routine which reproached him for accepting with insistence and persistence.