Therefore on this press-night as on every press-night--but somehow with worse effect this night than any--behold Mr. Wriford _satisfying himself_, and in the process whirling along towards the state that finds him sick and dizzy and trembling when at last the paper has gone to press and once more he has pulled through. Behold him shrinking lower in his chair as the night proceeds, smoking cigarettes in the way of six or seven puffs at each, then giddiness, and then hurling it from him with an exclamation, and then the craving for another if another line is to be written, and then the same process again; stopping in his work in the midst of a sentence, in the midst of a word, to examine a page sent down from the composing-room; twisting himself over it to _satisfy himself_ with it; rushing up-stairs with it to where, amid heat and atmosphere that are vile and intolerable to him, the linotype machines are rattling with din that is maddening to him, to _satisfy himself_ that the page has not been rushed to the foundry without his emendations; there, a hundred times, sharp argument that is infuriating to him with head-printer and machine-manager who battle with time and are always behind time because advertisements and blocks are late, and now, as they say, he must needs come and pull a page to pieces; down to his room again, and more and worse interruptions that a thousand times he tells himself he is a fool not to leave in other hands and yet will attend to to _satisfy himself_; time wasted with superior members of his staff who come to write the final leaders on the last of the night's news and who are affected by no thought of need for haste but must wait and gossip till this comes from Reuter's or that from _The Intelligence's_ own correspondent; time wasted over the line they think should be taken and the line to which Mr. Wriford, to _satisfy himself_, must induce them. Sometimes, thus occupied with one of these men, Mr. Wriford--a part of his mind striving to concentrate on the article he was himself in the midst of writing, part concentrating on the page that lay before him waiting to be examined, part on the jump in expectation of a frantic printer's boy rushing in for the page at any moment, and the whole striving to force itself from these distractions and fix on the subject under discussion--sometimes in these tumults Mr. Wriford would have the impulse to let the man go and write what he would and be damned to him, or the page go as it stood and be damned to it, or his own article be cancelled and something--anything to fill--take its place. But that would not be _satisfying himself_, and that would be present relief at the cost of future dissatisfaction, and somehow Mr. Wriford would make the necessary separate efforts--somehow pull through. II