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dark. It had been another exhausting day and he needed silence and separateness. He would work out Capablanca’s game with Lasker, and go to bed early.
    His fatigue was out of proportion to the day; he wondered at it. The trip from New York had taken longer than usual; a lightning storm had damaged power lines, and after the change at Cypress Hills from the elevated, the trolley crawled to Jamaica and Barnett. By the time he had walked the mile up from Main Street to the house, he was conscious of a dragging pain in his back and shoulders.
    Only rarely did he regret the decision to move out to Long Island so that the girls, at least, could grow up from babyhood in a thoroughly American environment, but tonight was one of the times. For a man on a morning newspaper—daily except Saturdays—with the first deadline at eleven each night, it was a hard trip, harder than it had been nine years ago when they had taken the step.
    When he was a block away from home, Shag heard him and came loping across the empty fields to greet him. Having a dog was charming; there was a great clumsy loving energy about Shag that appealed to him even when he was depressed.
    “How are you, boy?”
    Shag leaped at him, his weight striking full on his shoulders.
    “Down,” Stefan shouted. “Lie down.” He bent to pat the great animal. “You blockhead you,” he said. “Come home and behave yourself.”
    The lightning storm had wiped the sky clear of cloud, and the rain had freshened the odors of new grass and earth. In the pale light, the house looked beautiful. Stefan Ivarin drew a deep breath and some inner tightness loosened. Walking more easily, he climbed the three concrete steps that rose in the bank of ground, and then the three wooden steps of the porch.
    But for once the chess game failed to stimulate him and he left it before the final moves. With vague apprehension he wondered again why he should feel so weary. It was never hard work, long hours, the expenditure of energy which produced this depletion; it was, rather, depression.
    Was the situation at the office really growing worse, or did he imagine it? Nonsense, Ivarin thought. I am no skittish youth to be imagining. A clash will come between us. He is heading for a show of power which will kill off one or the other of us.
    Well, let it come. If the Jewish News is to go in for Joseph Fehler’s yellow journalism, I would not remain in any case. Fehler bridles at the phrase, but his schemes are all for sensationalism in the paper. In this too he is an extremist, not in his politics alone. It was a bad day when Fehler was appointed Business Manager, bad for the paper, bad for my peace of mind.
    An anarchist for a business manager and efficiency expert—that is a touch of the sardonic for you. Socialism is too moderate for Mr. Fehler, the Socialist Party is too moderate, I am too moderate, Debs is too moderate. Only the Socialist Labor Party—how mischievous political titles could be, concealing disparate principles under similarities, to confuse the innocent or naïve—only Fehler’s S.L.P. is any good! Like all extremists everywhere, in Russia, in America, even in the offices of newspapers, Fehler will hurl his little bombs the moment he feels powerful enough to do so. Woe to anybody in his way. Woe to anybody when the extremists win anything anywhere.
    Ivarin slowly undressed and went to bed. He had never liked Joseph Fehler, not even at the beginning when he had not yet known he disliked him. On a larger paper, more departmentalized, his path would rarely have crossed that of the Business Manager; for most editors, it was a point of honor to steer clear of “the money side.” But the Jewish News, though only 30,000 less in circulation than the Forward, was informal and loose in its structure and behavior, and when Fehler had come to work some five years before, the staff was still small enough to make this steering-clear impractical. Duties overlapped; to this day sudden