Yet, disturbed as he was in spirit, Hartley felt not altogether unthankful for being thrown in with Repellier and his friends. As he looked out on them he even forgot, for the time being, how he had first come to Repellier, a forlorn and somewhat shabbily dressed young foreigner--forgot how the two of them had first met in America, by accident, under the maples of Madison Square. It was the very morning that Hartley had lost the Platt interview for the United News Bureau, and after his polite ejection from the crowded committee rooms in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, when he walked hot and indignant up and down the shade of the open square. There the two friends had met, and Hartley had grimly confessed that his first week on a New York newspaper had resulted in prompt dismissal, that his efforts as a literary free-lance had been equally disastrous, and that he had finally drifted into one of those literary syndicates which dispose of news and delectable sensation in copper-plate, by the column, gratuitously typed and boxed for the rural reader. He also dolefully confessed that he had been sent out to pick up interviews--"With any old guy worth while, only put ginger in 'em," were the somewhat disconcerting instructions to the young man to whom New York still stood as a sealed book. Repellier had thought the thing over for a moment. "Why not come and interview me?" he had asked, though Hartley little dreamed the old artist in doing so was breaking a lifelong principle of reticence. It was this interview which, in the words of his managing editor, had saved his scalp. Hartley had, accordingly, reason to be drawn toward Repellier, and to nurse as well a vicarious affection for the numerous enough friends of the old artist now gathered about him. The humiliating memory, too, of his own ignominy and the meagerness of his own accomplishments prompted the young scholar from Oxford again and again to tell himself that he was a lucky beggar, that he ought to be only too glad to rub elbows with these obviously successful men and women of the world, even though they did chance, at that particular moment, to be frolicking about like a band of undergraduates after a bump-race, and variedly shocking his youthful sense of propriety. For the old artist's army of friends had brought along with them armfuls of gifts, many of them costly, many of them ingeniously grotesque, and the traditional formality of presenting these tokens, with many cheers and shouts of laughter and much clapping of hands, again left Hartley puzzling over a phase of American humor which is, perhaps, always incomprehensible to the outlander.