"All acidulated nonsense, my dears--and there are too many little home-made Aristophaneses running around America already." Then she turned back, good-naturedly, to Hartley, who had been puzzled just how to take it all. It was, in a way, the first time he had seen Celebrity on parade. There was a self-consciousness and a somewhat bewildering flashiness about it that he had not counted on. He was most eager to appear among them anything but ponderous, yet he felt some insurmountable paling of prejudice to be shutting him out from them. "I guess that's what you Oxford men call ragging," his champion went on conciliatingly. "But I suppose you've been taught not to take New Yorkers too seriously long before this. You see, we Americans have never learned to irrigate the alkali out of our humor." She bore him away, like a harbor-tug swinging out a liner, and looked with him from one of the broad-silled studio windows. Hartley was half afraid of women; they saw it, and liked him for it. "It's so much keener chasing the bee than 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."