"What has been his experience?" asked the editor, as the thought of all the hard work he had to do in the next hour and a half wrestled in his mind with his pleasure in the young woman's voice. "Why," she said, "before he went into the army I don't know that he had any particular experience. He was just out of college, you see." "Oh!" said the editor, "I see. And why," he asked musingly, "do you want him to be an editor?" "Well, I don't know exactly," answered the young woman, "I just thought it would be rather nice to have him be an editor." Even so. Day after day, come into publishing houses young persons, and indeed people of all ages, who have a hunch (and apparently nothing more to go by) that they would like to be "an editor." Also, in every other mail, come letters from aspirants in distant parts setting forth (what they deem) their qualifications. Now and then someone makes such an application who has been an editor before. It (editing) is probably the only business he knows, and perhaps it is too late (or his spirit is too broken) for him to take up another. So, disillusioned but not misguided, for him there is charity of thought. But the fledglings are in the great majority. Their qualifications (is it necessary to say?) usually are: a university degree, perhaps some association with a college paper, maybe the credit of an article (or a poem) or two published in a minor magazine issued for the Intelligentzia, a very sincere attachment to books of superior worth, a disdain for empyreal literature, openness to a modest salary (to begin), and an abysmal lack of any comprehension of the business of publishing books or magazines. Every little bit turns up one who (it develops) wants a job on the side, as it were, merely to sustain the real business of life, which (maybe) is taking a graduate course at Columbia, or some such thing. And in many cases (it is obvious) the real business of life is writing poetry, or fiction, though to this end a job must be endured--doubtless temporarily.