No two persons in all the world would have been less welcome among the guests at the hotel, just then, than were these professional reporters. Of course everybody tried to give them a cordial greeting, but they were classed along with Miss Crabb as dangerous characters whom it would be folly to snub. Miss Moyne was in downright terror of them, associating the thought of them with those ineffable pictures of herself which were still appearing at second and third hand in the "patent insides" of the country journals, but she was very good to them, and Miss Stackpole at once attached herself to her unshakably. Hubbard did likewise with little Mrs. Philpot, who amused him mightily with her strictures upon analytical realism in fiction. "I do think that Mr. Howells treated you most shamefully," she said to him. "He had no right to represent you as a disagreeable person who was cruel to his wife and who had no moral stamina." Hubbard laughed as one who hears an absurd joke. "Oh, Howells and I have an understanding. We are really great friends," he said. "I sat to him for my portrait and I really think he flattered me. I managed to keep him from seeing some of my ugliest lines." "Now you are not quite sincere," said Mrs. Philpot, glancing over him from head to foot. "You are not so bad as he made you out to be. It's one of Mr. Howells's hobbies to represent men as rather flabby nonentities and women as invalids or dolls." "He's got the men down fine," replied Hubbard, "but I guess he is rather light on women. You will admit, however, that he dissects feminine meanness and inconsequence with a deft turn." "He makes fun of women," said Mrs. Philpot, a little testily, "he caricatures them, wreaks his humor on them; but you know very well that he misrepresents them even in his most serious and _quasi_ truthful moods." Hubbard laughed, and there was something essentially vulgar in the notes of the laugh. Mrs. Philpot admitted this mentally, and she found herself shrinking from his steadfast but almost conscienceless eyes. "I imagine I shouldn't be as bad a husband as he did me into, but--" Mrs. Philpot interrupted him with a start and a little cry. "Dear me! and aren't you married?" she asked in exclamatory deprecation of what his words had implied. He laughed again very coarsely and looked at her with eyes that almost lured. "Married!" he exclaimed, "do I look like a marrying man? A newspaper man can't afford to marry." "How strange," reflected Mrs. Philpot, "how funny, and Mr. Howells calls himself a realist!" "Realist!" laughed Hubbard, "why he does not know enough about the actual world to be competent to purchase a family horse. He's a capital fellow, good and true and kind-hearted, but what does he know about affairs? He doesn't even know how to flatter women!" "How absurd!" exclaimed little Mrs. Philpot, but Hubbard could not be sure for the life of him just what she meant the expression to characterize.