At that moment a servant entered the room and handed a note to her mistress. “Excuse me, Gertrude,” she said, and opening the envelope read the following words from Richard:-- “MY DEAR MRS. PERCY-BARTLETT,--The miracle has been performed. Mr. John Fenton will accompany me to your musicale on Tuesday evening. Your invitation will reach him if addressed to the Press Club.” The reader smiled, and handed the epistle to Gertrude Van Vleck. “And who is John Fenton?” asked Gertrude, after perusing the note. “Oh, John Fenton,” said Mrs. Percy-Bartlett gayly, “John Fenton is an experiment.” CHAPTER VIII. “Meeting strangers at a musicale is not always a pleasant experience. If you are musical, the people bore you; if you are sociable, the music bores you.” So John Fenton had said to Richard Stoughton, when the latter had made his first effort to perform a miracle and obtain the former’s acceptance in advance of Mrs. Percy-Bartlett’s invitation. “But you owe me this reparation, Fenton,” Richard had urged. “When you gave me those books on the single-tax theory to read, did I hold off and say that if I was indifferent the books would bore me, or, if I became a convert, I would bore my friends? No; I made no excuses, but read the books. Now I claim my reward. You have failed, after a fair trial, to make me an advocate of the immediate establishment of the millennium. Let me now have an equal chance of persuading you that the best thing to do is to take the world as we find it, and enjoy the good the gods provide.” The two men were spending the hour after dinner in Fenton’s bachelor-apartments. They had fallen into the way of dining together whenever they were both free to do so; and their friendship, having withstood the failure of Fenton’s effort to make the young man an economic radical, had grown warmer as the weeks went by. In several ways Fenton had derived considerable benefit from his close intercourse with Stoughton. It had been remarked in the city room of the _Trumpet_ that Fenton had given up drinking cocktails, and that he had grown particular about his attire. He no longer allowed his hair and beard to show signs of neglect; and the reporters for the paper had said to each other that the assistant editor did not seem to be quite as sarcastic and testy as he had been in former times. But if any one had told Fenton that a youth not long out of college, and of a mental make-up that was dazzling rather than convincing, had been the active cause in begetting certain reforms in his habits of life, the cynical and time-scarred journalist would have considered his informant insane. The strongest men are moulded and remoulded by their friends, but they are seldom willing to acknowledge the fact.