Romance Island

"He made me," defensively claimed Bennietod; frowning deferentially at Little Cawthorne.

"Hello, St. George," said the latter, "come on back to the office. Crass sits in your place and he wears cravats the colour of goblin's blood. Come back."

"Not he," said Chillingworth, smoking; "the Dead-and-Done-with editor is too keen for that; I won't give him a job. He's ruined. Egg sandwiches will never stimulate him now."

St. George joined in the relieved laugh that followed. They were remembering his young Sing Sing convict who had completed his sentence in time to step in a cab and follow his mother to the grave, where his stepfather refused to have her coffin opened. And St. George, fresh from his Alma Mater, had weighted the winged words of his story with allusions to the tears celestial of Thetis, shed for Achilles, and Creon's grief for Haemon, and the Unnatural Combat of Massinger's father and son; so that Chillingworth had said things in languages that are not dead (albeit a bit Elizabethan) and the composing room had shaken mailed fists.

"Hi, you!" said Little Cawthorne, who was born in the South, "this is a mellow minute. I could wish they came often. This shall be a weekly occurrence--not so, St. George?"

"Cawthorne," Chillingworth warned, "mind your manners, or they'll make you city editor."

A momentary shadow was cast by the appearance of Rollo, who was manifestly a symbol of the world Philistine about which these guests knew more and in which they played a smaller part than any other class of men. But the tray which Rollo bore was his passport. Thereafter, they all trooped to the table, and Chillingworth sat at the head, and from the foot St. George watched the city editor break bread with the familiar nervous gesture with which he was wont to strip off yards of copy-paper and eat it. There was a tacit assumption that he be the conversational sun of the hour, and in fostering this understanding the host took grateful refuge.

"This is shameful," Chillingworth began contentedly. "Every one of you ought to be out on the Boris story."

"What is the Boris story?" asked St. George with interest. But in all talk St. George had a restful, host-like way of playing the rôle of opposite to every one who preferred being heard.

"I'll wager the boy hasn't been reading the papers these three months," Amory opined in his pleasant drawl.

"No," St. George confessed; "no, I haven't. They make me homesick."