"
"But why did you write it?" the editor persisted. "Where did you get
the idea from?"
Burton looked at him in mild-eyed wonder.
"It is just what I see as I pass along," he explained.
The sub-editor was an ambitious literary man himself and he looked
steadfastly away from his visitor, out of the window, his eyes full of
regret, his teeth clenched almost in anger. Just what he saw as he
passed along! What he saw--this common-looking, half-educated little
person, with only the burning eyes and sensitive mouth to redeem him
from utter insignificance! Truly this was a strange finger which opened
the eyes of some and kept sealed the eyelids of others! For fifteen
years this very cultivated gentleman who sat in the sub-editor's chair
and drew his two thousand a year, had driven his pen along the scholarly
way, and all that he had written, beside this untidy-looking document,
had not in it a single germ of the things that count.
"Well?" Burton asked, with ill-concealed eagerness.
The sub-editor was, after all, a man. He set his teeth and came back to
the present.
"My readers will, I am sure, find your little article quite
interesting," he said calmly. "We shall be glad to accept it, and
anything else you may send us in the same vein.
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