"Come on," said he at last, "that's good enough. They can read it, all right, and those few letters don't matter. Let it go at that." But Bobby shook his head and carried the form back to the composing stone. Four days he worked over the first page of the _Weekly Eagle_. Johnny expostulated, stormed, pleaded with tears in his eyes. "Let's let the whole thing slide," he begged. "All we get out of it anyway is less'n a dollar and think of all the time we're wasting. That job for Mr. Fowler isn't all done, and Smith's Meat Market is going to order some bill-heads." But Bobby was obstinate. Finally Johnny, in disgust, left him to his own devices. The world for Bobby contained but one thing. His recollections of that time are of a flaring gas jet and the smell of printer's ink. He won finally and duly delivered the eighteen copies--letter-perfect. Probably five hundred other and imperfect examples of the _Weekly Eagle_ found their way into the furnace. Johnny plucked up heart and returned, only to find that the printing press question was dead as far as Bobby was concerned. "I'm sick of printing," was all Bobby would say, and no argument as to unexploited wealth could move him. The subject had not only lost interest, but mere casual thought of its details brought on a faint repetition of the mental lethargy. The sight of the press and its varied appurtenances threw his mind into the defensive blank coma which rendered him incapable of the simplest intellectual effort. This was something as outside Bobby's control as the beating of his heart. He did not understand it, nor attempt to analyze it. "I'm sick of it," said he; just as after the labour of building a fort in Monrovia, he had with the same remark deserted his companions on the threshold of its enjoyment. Bobby thought he exercised a choice when he turned from printing, just as he chose whether to walk on the right or on the left side of the street. In reality it would have been impossible for him to re-enter his interest, his enthusiasm; impossible even for him to have accomplished the mechanical labour of the trade save at an utterly disproportionate expense of nervous energy. Bobby did not know this; of course, Johnny was not capable of such analysis. The only human being who might have understood and worked in correction of the tendency, read the affair amiss. Mrs. Orde was only too glad to get Bobby into the open air again, and saw in his abandonment of this feverish enthusiasm only cause for rejoicing.