This came gradually but naturally to be Seth’s habitual evening resort. It represented to him, indeed, all that was friendly and inviting in Tecumseh society. He was able to recall dimly some of the notions of coming social distinction he indulged in the farm days--dreams of a handsome young editor who was in great request in the most refined and luxurious home circles, who said the most charming things to beautiful young ladies at parties and balls, who wavered in his mind between wedding his employer’s daughter and taking a share in the paper, or choosing some lowlier but more intellectual maid to wife, and leading with her a halcyon and exaltedly literary career in a cottage--but they were as unreal, as indistinct now as the dreams of night before last. All the social bars seemed drawn against him as a matter of course. This did not impress him as a hardship, because he was only vaguely conscious of it, at first, and then grew into the habit of regarding it as a thing to be grateful for. Tom Watts pointed out to him frequently the advantage of being a Bohemian, of being free from all the fearsome, undefined routine and responsibility of making calls, of dressing up in the evening, and of dangling supine attendance upon girls and their mammas. This “social racket,” the city editor said, might please some people; Dent, for instance, seemed to like it. But for his part it seemed quite the weakest thing a young man could go in for--entirely incompatible with the robust and masculine character demanded in a successful journalist. This presented itself to Seth as an extremely sound position, and he made it his own so willingly that very soon he began to take credit to himself in his own eyes for having turned a deaf ear to the social siren, and having deliberately rejected the advances of fashionable Tecumseh. He grew, really, to believe that it was by preference, by a wise resolution to preserve his freedom and individuality, that he remained outside the mysterious, impalpable regions which were labelled in his mind as “Society.” On the other hand, there was no nonsense at Bismarck’s, or at the other similar beer halls to which Tom introduced him. One dressed as one chose, and did as one liked; seven-up or penochle provided just the mental recreation a wearied literary brain demanded; and the fellows one met there were cheerful, companionable young men, who likewise had no nonsense about them, who put on no airs of superiority, and who glided swiftly and jovially through the grades of acquaintanceship to intimacy. Seth was greatly strengthened in his liking for this refuge from loneliness in a strange city by what he saw of Arthur Dent, whom Watts had prepared him to regard as the embodiment of the other and strait-laced side.