Banneker was deeply discouraged.  He wanted to resign.

Perhaps he would nave resigned, if old Mynderse Verschoyle had not died at eight o’clock on the morning of the day when Banneker was the earliest man to report at the office.  A picturesque character, old Mynderse, who had lived for forty-five years with his childless wife in the ancient house on West 10th Street, and for the final fifteen years had not addressed so much as a word to her.  She had died three months before; and now he had followed, apparently, from what Banneker learned in an interview with the upset and therefore voluble secretary of the dead man, because, having no hatred left on which to center his life, he had nothing else to live for.  Banneker wrote the story of that hatred, rigid, ceremonious, cherished like a rare virtue until it filled two lives; and he threw about it the atmosphere of the drear and divided old house.  At the end, the sound of the laughter of children at play in the street.

The article appeared word for word as he had written it.  That noon Tommy Burt, the funny man, drawing down his hundred-plus a week on space, came over and sat on Banneker’s desk, and swung his legs and looked at him mournfully and said: 

“You’ve broken through your shell at last.”

“Did you like it?” asked Banneker.

“Like it!  My God, if I could write like that!  But what’s the use!  Never in the world.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense,” returned Banneker, pleased.  “Of course you can.  But what’s the rest of your ’if’?”

“I wouldn’t be wasting my time here.  The magazines for me.”

“Is that better?”

“Depends on what you’re after.  For a man who wants to write, it’s better, of course.”

“Why?”

“Gives him a larger audience.  No newspaper story is remembered overnight except by newspaper men.  And they don’t matter.”

“Why don’t they matter?” Banneker was surprised again, this time rather disagreeably.

“It’s a little world.  There isn’t much substance to it.  Take that Verschoyle stuff of yours; that’s literature, that is!  But you’ll never hear of it again after next week.  A few people here will remember it, and it’ll help you to your next raise.  But after you’ve got that, and, after that, your lift onto space, where are you?”

The abruptly confidential approach of Tommy Burt flattered Banneker with the sense that by that one achievement of the Verschoyle story he had attained a new status in the office.  Later there came out from the inner sanctum where sat the Big Chief, distilling venom and wit in equal parts for the editorial page, a special word of approval.  But this pleased the recipient less than the praise of his peers in the city room.

After that first talk, Burt came back to Banneker’s desk from time to time, and once took him to dinner at “Katie’s,” the little German restaurant around the corner.  Burt was given over to a restless and inoffensively egoistic pessimism.