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 subsided in due time, with the aid of a good deal of bad liquor. Afterward, bitterness and a sense of the futility of all dreams and all desires dwelt in him. This was his reaction. And while it ran its course he looked upon life with the eyes of a cynic, and his whole mental state was a sneer. Women? Treacherous. Love? A story-book fallacy. Ideals? As sand huts on a tidal beach, built for destruction.

But there was work. ("Thank God!" said Jock somewhat melodramatically, as young men in like plight have said since time immemorial.) Congenial work. Absorbing work. In a great dirty room full of shirt-sleeved figures, prodigious tables row on row, smooth sheets of copy paper, crumpled wads of copy paper, typewriters that chattered like a million teeth in a chill, air that was dead with smoke and must and dust and printers' ink, and alive—frantic—with breathlessness. . . . From the day of his introduction to the city room of the Log he had only to enter it to feel his spirits lighten. It was a refuge and a resort, a place where the little aches of individuals were forgotten in the mighty birth-pangs of a Thing.

They gave him, of course, only the most trifling assignments at the start. But the least of them thrilled him. He loved the voice of the city editor, rasping "Hamill"; the dash to some out-of-the-way place to get some unimportant item; the privilege of mentioning the name of the Log by way of identification. He loved to return and seat himself at one of those battered typewriters, with his shoes hooked about the legs of his chair and his body hunched over, and watch words leap out in lines from the tips of his fingers. This was fulfillment, in small degree, of his secret ambition. Writing. Putting things down on paper. Seeing them in print. . . . It meant much to be able to open an