The interview with Conant was no less exhilarating. It was in the reception-room of the great house that it took place, and while waiting for Conant to come in, Overbeck, his heart in his mouth, recognised, in the original drawings on the walls, picture after picture, signed by famous illustrators, that he had seen reproduced in Conant’s magazine. Then Conant himself had appeared and shaken the young author’s hand a long time, and had talked to him with the utmost kindness of his book, of his plans for the immediate future, of the work he would do in the editorial office and of the next novel he wished him to write. "We’ll only need you here in the mornings," said the editor, "and you can put in your afternoons on your novel. Have you anything in mind as good as ’Bunt McBride’?" "I have a sort of notion for one," hazarded the young man; and Conant had demanded to hear it. Stammering, embarrassed, Overbeck outlined it. "I see, I see!" Conant commented. "Yes, there is a good story in that. Maybe Hastings will want to use it in the monthly. But we’ll make a book of it, anyway, if you work it up as well as the McBride story." And so the young fellow made his first step in New York. The very next day he began his second novel. In the editorial office, where he spent his mornings reading proof and making up "front matter," he made the acquaintance of a middle-aged lady, named Miss Patten, who asked him to call on her, and later on introduced him into the "set" wherein she herself moved. The set called itself the "New Bohemians," and once a week met at Miss Patten’s apartment up-town. In a month’s time Overbeck was a fixture in "New Bohemia." It was made up of minor poets whose opportunity in life was the blank space on a magazine page below the end of an article; of men past their prime, who, because of an occasional story in a second-rate monthly, were considered to have "arrived"; of women who translated novels from the Italian and Hungarian; of decayed dramatists who could advance unimpeachable reasons for the non-production of their plays; of novelists whose books were declined by publishers because of professional jealousy on the part of the "readers," or whose ideas, stolen by false friends, had appeared in books that sold by the hundreds of thousands. In public the New Bohemians were fulsome in the praise of one another’s productions. Did a sonnet called, perhaps, "A Cryptogram is Stella’s Soul" appear in a current issue, they fell on it with eager eyes, learned it by heart and recited lines of it aloud; the conceit of the lover translating the cipher by the key of love was welcomed with transports of delight. "Ah, one of the most exquisitely delicate allegories I’ve ever heard, and so true—so ’in the tone’!"