By some kind of near-miracle the veteran ex-newspaperman wasn't even slightly tight and his voice was steady. He was standing a few feet from Eaton, leaning lightly against Macklin's desk and puffing on a light-weight briar. "I was completely sure," Timothy Hansen said. "Every time Gilmore came to the office to talk with Miss Lathrup I felt uneasily, just looking at him. Those burning dark eyes, and that craggy, strange face of his. Brother! He sure fitted the picture most people probably had of writers--back in the Victorian Age. You'd think he'd stepped right out of the pages of _Wuthering Heights_." Hansen was not quite an associate but a little more than an assistant editor. He was still quite young--twenty-seven--and had been on the staff for three years, working directly under Allen Gerstle's guidance. Macklin had always translated that as "thumb" in the preparation of the missing editor's cafe society exposure columns. Gerstle had a fiery temper and could lose it easily, but Hansen seemed to have a genuine affection for him and was taking his vanishment very much to heart. Macklin sat behind his desk, idly running his forefinger over the space-bar of his typewriter, back and forth lightly, as if he were inwardly telling himself that if he should decide to write an account of the progress which the police had made so far, he would only need to depress the bar continuously. "You're all making the same mistake," Macklin said. "It's one of the oldest mistakes in the world--and the most foolish. You're taking it for granted that there has to be something unusual, abnormal, different, about an imaginative young writer, or an old one, for that matter. Or a creative artist in any field. No, I'm not putting it in just the right way. There is something different about them, or they wouldn't be creative artists. But that difference doesn't reside in their sanity--or lack of it. It is my contention that creative artists are--if you wish to drag abnormality into it--almost abnormally sane." "I'm afraid I don't get what you're driving at at all," Ellers said quickly. "I can quote you a passage in refutation of that from no less an authority than Aristotle." He paused, smiling a little and nodding to himself, and Macklin found himself wondering if he were trying to impress Eaton with his learning, and was not otherwise interested in scoring a point in an argument which, with a little effort, might be enlarged to include alcoholics. It would be a completely false and unjustified enlargement, but Macklin hadn't said enough so far to give Ellers any inkling of that. "Here's the quote," Ellers went on. "'No great genius was ever without some mixture of madness, nor can anything grand or superior to the voice of common mortals be spoken except by the agitated soul.'"