philosopher and scientist. But there was something glimmering; there which I never caught—flashes of sincerity, of real feeling, I imagined, which were sped ere I could grasp; echoes of the man he once was, possibly, or hints of the man behind the mask. But the mask he never lifted, and the real man we never knew.
“But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?” I asked. “Never mind Loria. Tell me.”
“Well, if I must.” He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.
“In a town that shall be nameless,” he began, “in fact, a city of fifty thousand, a fair and beautiful city wherein men slave for dollars and women for dress, an idea came to me. My front was prepossessing, as fronts go, and my pockets empty. I had in recollection a thought I once entertained of writing a reconciliation of Kant and Spencer. Not that they are reconcilable, of course, but the room offered for scientific satire—”
I waved my hand impatiently, and he broke off.
“I was just tracing my mental states for you, in order to show the genesis of the action,” he explained. “However, the idea came. What was the matter with a tramp sketch for the daily press? The Irreconcilability of the Constable and the Tramp, for instance? So I hit the drag (the drag, my dear fellow, is merely the street), or the high places, if you will, for a newspaper office. The elevator whisked me into the sky, and Cerberus, in the guise of an anaemic office boy, guarded the door. Consumption, one could see it at a glance; nerve, Irish, colossal; tenacity, undoubted; dead inside the year.
“‘Pale youth,’ quoth I, ‘I pray thee the way to the sanctum-sanctorum, to the Most High Cock-a-lorum.’
“He deigned to look at me, scornfully, with infinite weariness.
“‘G’wan an’ see the janitor. I don’t know nothin’ about the gas.’
“‘Nay, my lily-white, the editor.’
“‘Wich editor?’ he snapped like a young bullterrier. ‘Dramatic? Sportin’? Society? Sunday? Weekly? Daily? Telegraph? Local? News? Editorial? Wich?’
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