"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.
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