Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/276

 He still disliked reading copy as much as he loved to fly around the town, with his glasses sliding down his nose, after big news. "It's the only way to live," he said. "I expect to die out on a story."

It might seem strange that he enjoyed it all. He had seen so much that his personal zest in seeing things had worn out long ago. Every sort of occurrence, every sort of human situation, every sort of human character was as old and familiar to him as the streets of New York, which he knew so well that, looking out of an elevated window, between stations, no matter what part of the island it was or how long he might have been asleep and oblivious to the guard's voice, he could give you the name of the street "just by the feel of it," he said, and usually a reminiscence of some story he had worked up in that street, too.

Similarly, the manifestation of all human emotions seemed to him old, stale, and somewhat absurd.

Not that he was cynical. He was beyond that. Cynicism is more or less active. He had reached a sort of passive, premature