Page:The council of seven.djvu/90

 instinct of the dominant human male was to affect a high contempt, but the instinct of a mind acquainted with a thousand-and-one cross currents immediately below the troubled surface of human society was very different. As he stood at his writing table, holding the letter in his hand, a chill seemed to strike at his heart.

He was still in this attitude when Robert Norton, one of the principal leader writers of the Planet, came into the room. Norton, a brilliant Irishman of thirty, was the master of a diabolically incisive but absolutely unscrupulous pen. Without convictions of his own, without faith, religion or a sense of justice, at every fresh cast of the political horoscope he was ready at a moment's notice to make the worse appear the better part in entire subordination to the abnormal mind by whom he was rewarded with the salary of a prime minister.

"Ha, Norton, good-morning!" It was a wrench for the Colossus to break his reverie, but with an effort he managed to do so.

Norton, typical product of the large public school and the old university, bowed slightly. He was able to hide the urbane irony of his race, and that was all. With the air of a man at some pains to conceal the fact that his tongue is in his cheek he waited for the august Chief of the U. P. to speak again.

"Are you up in this Garland business?"

It was second nature with Saul Hartz to weigh his