Hartley himself had been carefully warned never to touch on religion, politics, or even locality in any of his contributions. It had also been impressed on his bewildered brain that there existed in American public life a mysterious factor known as the "Irish element," and that under no circumstances must he express any opinion or make any allusion which might be interpreted as offensive to this element. If in doubt, his editor commanded, he must be as Anglophobic as possible. He was also to make it a point to wax gently sarcastic, even playfully malicious, when speaking of that effete and overluxurious city New York--the name of which, it appeared, was bitter in the mouth of all outsiders. Hartley could never fathom why this was, but it was. And that seemed enough. He learned to feel less uncomfortable masquerading under his different pen-names after discovering that the heavily bearded old German who smoked bad tobacco at the desk next to his own flourished in the columns of the Woman's and Fashion Page as Daisy Dineen, the unquestioned authority on dumpling recipes in ten thousand unsuspecting homes. These were the offices and this was the atmosphere into which Hartley listlessly came the morning after his interview with Cordelia Vaughan, when he had faltered in telling her his real verdict on The Unwise Virgins. This was the bitter gateway through which he had once dreamed he could enter some Eden of eminence. As he passed to his desk and mopped the dust from it with an old newspaper, the place and all it stood for filled him with a sudden new-born disgust and weariness, a feeling more reckless than any which had before taken possession of him. He was sick of the smell of turpentine and printers' ink. He was sick of the unventilated rooms and the bad light. Daisy Dineen's tobacco-smoke drifted smotheringly about him. A plaintive minor note seemed to creep into the tinkling chorus of the many busy typewriters behind many little wooden partitions. There seemed something ghoulish and subterranean in the stooped, dimly lighted crooked figures of the patient writers about him. If earth's voracious readers beyond the pale only knew and understood! Hartley was leaning disconsolately on his elbow, thinking this thought, when the shrill and slightly nasal voice of the managing editor called him. He got up and went listlessly to the editorial desk, still hearing some note of latent pathos in the patient tinkling of the many typewriters. "Look here, Lord Haughtly"--from his first day with the bureau they had dubbed him Lord Haughtly, the opprobriousness of which he had born with good-natured and smiling resignation--"what stuff have you turned in this last week?"