He had tried to tell Clive about Rose-Ann, but his first words, “a girl over at Community House,” had apparently evoked in Clive’s mind the picture of a misguided spinster of forty whose repressed maternal instincts were finding satisfaction in the running of other people’s lives—a creature against whom he proceeded to warn Felix in humorous terms. “She will manage you, Felix,” he said, “—for your own good. Now it’s all right to be managed by a woman, so long as it is for her benefit. You can at least complain about it. But when you’re managed for your own good, you are helpless.” Felix objected to this notion of Rose-Ann, but Clive asked her age. And Felix said he didn’t know, but that she was a little older than himself. “A little older than you. I thought so,” said Clive. “Beware!” There was no use talking to Clive about girls, anyway; it was a subject upon which he was frequently bitter and always absurd. Felix had told Rose-Ann a little about him, and she had said, “He’s been hurt by some girl.” Doubtless that was true. And Felix felt a certain satisfaction in the inward comparison of this creature of Clive’s distorted fancy with the real and delightful Rose-Ann—whom even as Clive talked he could see in memory, with himself standing by and caressing with his gaze every swift movement of that delicate and supple doll-body of hers. “You’re all wrong,” he said to Clive. “She’s a pagan.” “Yes,” said Clive scornfully, “one of those settlement-house pagans.” Felix only laughed. All this, however, was not getting a job. By desperate economies, as his money dwindled, he was managing to hold out. But he could not hold out forever. Clive had asked him one day if he needed money, and he had answered evasively. There was no use starting that sort of thing. He had to get a job. But it looked as though he were not going to get a job. There seemed to be no use trying to impress city editors with his efficiency. There had been a vacancy on a morning paper, and another young man—with, so far as Felix could tell, no better qualifications than his own—had been selected. That discouraged him. Doubtless these city editors could see through his pretences.... 4 And then one afternoon when he dropped in at the Chronicle office, Clive asked him if he was ready to go to work Monday morning: he had been taken on as a reporter.... He would get, Clive told him, twenty dollars a week to start with. Clive told him this in a pleased but casual way, as though it were something long arranged between Felix and himself which had just been ratified by the higher powers. So Clive had been working for him all along! “Go and tell Harris you’ll be on deck,” said Clive. Harris was the city editor. “And better speak to the Old Man, too.” The Old Man was the managing editor, Mr. Devoe. Felix had never supposed for a moment that these personages had him under consideration.