So Trotter, once back in his own quarters, moved about with a
caution not untouched with apprehension. Mrs. Teetzel, he knew
had a tread that was noiseless. She also had the habit of
appearing, in curl-papers, at uncouth moments, as unheralded as
an apparition from the other world. And Trotter's conscience was
not clear. For months past he had kept secreted in his trunk one
of those single-holed gas heaters known as a "hot plate." This he
surreptitiously attached to the gas jet, and secretly thereon
made coffee and cooked his matutinal hard-boiled egg. There was a
thrill of excitement about it, a tang of outlawry, a touch of
danger. It took on the romance of a vast hazard. And it also
rather suited his purse, since that particular newspaper office
which he had journeyed to New York both to augment and to uplift
showed no undue haste in receiving him.
His third and last assault on the Advance office, in fact, had
amounted to an unequivocal ejection. Three short questions from
the shirt-sleeved autocrat of that benzine-odored bedlam had led
to Trotter's undoing. He wasn't expected to know much about
newspaper work, but before he came bothering people he ought at
least to know a shadow of something about the city he was living
in! And the one-time class orator of the University of Michigan
was calmly and pointedly advised to go and cut his eyeteeth on
the coral of adversity.
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