Gideon read it carefully, then laid it down and said, 'I don't agree with you that it's a good review. He's made at least two mistakes. And the whole thing's biased by his personal political theories.' 'Only enough to give it colour.' 'You don't want colour in a review of a book of that sort. You only want intelligence and exact knowledge.' 'Oh, Clitherton's all right. His head's screwed on the right way. He knows his subject.' 'Not well enough. He's a political theorist, not a good economist. That's hopeless. Why didn't you get Hinkson to do it?' 'Hinkson can't write for nuts.' 'Doesn't matter. Hinkson wouldn't have slipped up over his figures or dates.' 'My dear old chap, writing does matter. You're going crazy on that subject. Of course it matters that a thing should be decently put together.' 'It matters much more that it should be well informed. It is, of course, quite possible to be both.' 'Oh, quite. That's the idea of the _Fact_, after all.' 'Peacock, I hate all these slipshod fellows you get now. I wish you'd chuck the lot. They're well enough for most journalism, but they don't know enough for us.' Peacock said, 'Oh, we'll thrash it out another time, if you don't mind. I've got to get through some letters now,' and rang for his secretary. Gideon went to his own room and searched old files for the verification and correction of Clitherton's mistakes. He found them, and made a note of them. Unfortunately they weakened Clitherton's argument a little. Clitherton would have to modify it. Clitherton, a sweeping and wholesale person, would not like that. Gideon was feeling annoyed with Clitherton, and annoyed with several others among that week's contributors, and especially annoyed with Peacock, who permitted and encouraged them. If they went on like this, the _Fact_ would soon be popular; it would find its way into the great soft silly heart of the public and there be damned. He was a pathetic figure, Arthur Gideon, the intolerant precisian, fighting savagely against the tide of loose thinking that he saw surging in upon him, swamping the world and drowning facts. He did not see himself as a pathetic figure, or as anything else. He did not see himself at all, but worked away at his desk in the foggy room, checking the unconsidered or inaccurate or oversimplified statements of others, writing his own section of the Notes of the Week, with his careful, patient, fined brilliance, stopping to gnaw his pen or his thumb-nail or to draw diagrams, triangle within triangle, or circle intersecting circle, on his blotting paper. CHAPTER IV RUNNING AWAY 1