having the bee chase you," the Dean of Worcester's daughter had confessed one afternoon—for now and then the children of wisdom are given to wilfulness—after four fruitlessly challenging hours with him in a punt on the Cherwell.

"Mr. Repellier tells me he knew you in Oxford—he hopes you're going to do something worth while."

Hartley flushed youthfully. He was becoming de-anglicized with difficulty; he was still of that nation where reticence is a convention.

"Yes, I believe I was pointed out to him by the master of my college as the man who was sure to make a mess of life."

Miss Short raised her bushy eyebrows interrogatively.

"He said I had an overdose of ideality to work off, and was hard-headed enough to declare that epicureanism on one hundred and fifteen pounds a year was an absurdity."

"And to show him how wrong he was you're flinging yourself into this silly settlement work over here? Well, I don't see why you crawl into America by our back door!"

Hartley hesitated about explaining that to the destitute this back door came cheaper, for even the one hundred and fifteen pounds were now a thing of the past.

"I'm not really doing settlement work," he corrected, however. "It turned out that I wasn't orthodox enough for our East London Anglican Order to make room for me. Your own university settlement shut its doors on me as an outlander, and the only public institution that offered to take me in was a convalescent home in Harlem; they wanted a janitor. It would never have done, of course, to turn tail at the last moment, so I made the plunge alone. And now I'm simply trying to look at life in the raw; to get near it, you know; and understand it; and make the most of it."

He spoke lightly, but there was an undertone of bitterness in his words, a hint of the claws under the velvet of unconcern. For the first time Miss Short forgot the broad shoulders, and noticed the unlooked-for sternness about the young man's mouth, the hitherto uncaught thin chiseling of the ascetic nose and the puzzling dreaminess of the calm eyes. He was a man who had not found himself.

"But I could never see the use of going about being a student of evil," she said gently enough. "For I assure you you'll never do our East Side any good—though, perhaps, in another way, it may do you a lot of good. Tell me, though, what started you at it?"

"Repellier, more than any one else, I think. He told me to get Americanized, to come out of the mud-pond and get into the rapids. He suspected, you know, that all I did was loaf about Oxford and write radical verse."

"Well, perhaps it's best you did give up your poetry, and all that. We haven't much time for mooning over here, and if you'd come among us with the writing habit you'd soon have seen what a pitiful, pot-boiling lot we are, and you'd have got soured, and gone on one of the dailies, or dropped into translating, or drifted into a syndicate, and ended up by being still another young Israelite looking for an impossible promised land of American literature!"

Hartley winced a little and remained silent.

"It wouldn't have taken you long to find out what a lot of fakirs we are. Don't look shocked—fakirs is the only word; I'm one myself."

"But a fakir never confesses, does he?"

"Fifteen years ago I was earnest, ambitious, penniless, and proud-spirited. I imagined I was going to write the great American novel. Now I'm a silly, egotistical, spoiled old woman, writing advertisements for a Brooklyn soap-maker, publishing Sunday-school stories under seven different names, grinding out short stories and verses that I despise, and concocting a novel now and then that I abominate! That is the crown of thorns the city puts on your head. If I'd only stayed out in my little Wisconsin village, and gone hungry, and been unhappy, and waited, some day I might have written my great book!"

"Then why not go back, and wait, and be unhappy, and hungry, even, and write it?"

"It's too late; I can't. And that's the worst of it all. You see that bent, tired-looking old man sitting by the woman in gray? Well, he's the editor of 'The Republic.' For twenty years now he's been talking about the little peach-farm he's going to buy somewhere back in the New Jersey hills. He's never done it, poor old fellow! And he'll never do it. That's only his fata morgana, for he's foredoomed to die in harness. He couldn't break away from this life if he wanted to; he'd get homesick for the glare and noise and rush and rattle of it in a week, and perish of loneliness. But still he goes grinding away, dreaming about his peach-farm among the hills, and putting it continually off for one year more, and then still one year more. But there—you're beginning to think I'm a regular Jeremiah wailing in the desert of American mediocrity, so I'm going to leave you here alone to think it all over."

From the shadowy quietness of his window-seat Hartley looked out on the shifting, bewildering scene before him, a panorama of movement and color and energy that seemed to lose none of its unrest as midnight approached and waned. The young Oxonian felt that it was all a more or less disturbing glimpse of a new world that was opening up before him. He seemed able to catch at no order or meaning in the trend of it. At his Old World university, and in London itself, he had come more or less in touch with many of the great men of his age. About these Old World men there had always seemed to be an atmosphere—an almost repellent atmosphere—of academic calm, of intellectual reserve. When need be, they seemed able to surround themselves with a cuttlefish cloud of austerity. At that late day, a little to his distress, he was learning that eminence was not always august, that now and then even a lion could gambol. He wondered, in his perplexity, if it was some unexpected and belated blossoming of American humor, of that American humor which still so puzzled him. He did not condemn what seemed the eternal facetiousness of the American—he was still too avid of impression and too open-minded for that—but it disquieted him, and made him feel ill at ease.

Yet, disturbed as he was in spirit, Hartley felt not altogether unthankful for being thrown in with Repellier and his friends. As he looked out on them he even forgot, for the time being, how he had first come to Repellier, a forlorn and somewhat shabbily dressed young foreigner—forgot how the two of them had first met in America, by accident, under the maples of Madison Square. It was the very morning that Hartley had lost the Platt interview for the United News Bureau, and after his polite ejection from the crowded committee rooms in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, when he walked hot and indignant up and down the shade of the open square. There the two friends had met, and Hartley had grimly confessed that his first week on a New York newspaper had resulted in prompt dismissal, that his efforts as a literary free-lance had been equally disastrous, and that he had finally drifted into one of those literary syndicates which dispose of news and delectable sensation in copper-plate, by the column, gratuitously typed and boxed for the rural reader. He also dolefully confessed that he had been sent out to pick up interviews—"With any old guy worth while, only put ginger in 'em," were the somewhat disconcerting instructions to the young man to whom New York still stood as a sealed book. Repellier had thought the thing over for a moment. "Why not come and interview me?" he had asked, though Hartley little dreamed the old artist in doing so was breaking a lifelong principle of reticence. It was this interview which, in the words of his managing editor, had saved his scalp.

Hartley had, accordingly, reason to be drawn toward Repellier, and to nurse as well a vicarious affection for the numerous enough friends of the old artist now gathered about him. The humiliating memory, too, of his own ignominy and the meagerness of his own accomplishments prompted the young scholar from Oxford again