Moreover, he was still too jubilant over his play to feel depressed for long over anything; the warm and constantly manifested enthusiasm of his friends had kept his spirits from suffering any natural reaction. Their demand for his companionship was almost peremptory, and his thoughts turned to them as he stood on his balcony looking down on the waning throngs: the great stone buildings were humming like hives, and figures were passing busily to and fro behind the open windows. It astonished him a little. True, it was his first play and he was very popular. But he had a vague uneasy idea they were overdoing it. They talked of nothing else: his play, his brilliant future, his sure place in the crack regiment "if he hung on"; and they insisted that he must also express himself at least once through the medium of the novel. The great New York novel had yet to be written. They fairly dinned his gifts into his ears, until he was almost sick of them, and wondered if Mary were not also. She had seen a good deal of the Sophisticates lately, and from what she had let drop he inferred that even when he had not been present they had talked of little else. They had by no means waited for his play to be finished and read to a select few. Hogarth and Scores had assured them long before it was finished that it would be a great play. Once or twice there was a rustling in the back of his mind. They were not given to wild enthusiasms of this sort. They thought too highly of themselves. He realized how genuinely fond they were of him, but he had not hoped for more than critical appreciation, from the men, at least. Could it be possible . . . But he was still in the first flush of his triumph, his brain hummed with pleasant memories of those hours at Gora Dwight's, three nights ago. He had cleared the base of the pedestal on whose narrow and unaccommodating top he was soon to have his foothold, and it was not in human nature, at this stage of his progress, to suspect the sincerity of the adulation so generously poured at his feet.