Ray was willing enough to impart as much of his autobiography as related to the business change that had thrown him out of his place on the _Echo_. Then he sketched with objective airiness the sort of life one led in Midland, if one was a young man in society; and he found it no more than fair to himself to give some notion of his own local value in a graphic little account of the farewell dinner. “Yes,” said Mr. Kane, “I can imagine how you should miss all that, and I don’t know that New York has anything so pleasant to offer. I fancy the conditions of society are incomparably different in Midland and in New York. You seem to me a race of shepherds and shepherdesses out there; your pretty world is like a dream of my own youth, when Boston was still only a large town, and was not so distinctly an aoristic Athens as it is now.” “I had half a mind to go to Boston with my book first,” said Ray. “But somehow I thought there were more chances in New York.” “There are certainly more publishers,” Kane admitted. “Whether there are more chances depends upon how much independent judgment there is among the publishers. Have you found them very judicial?” “I don’t quite understand what you mean.” “Did any one of them seem to be a man who would give your novel an unprejudiced reading if you took it to him and told him honestly that it had been rejected by all the others?” “No, I can’t say any of them did. But I don’t know that I could give my manuscript an unprejudiced reading myself under the same circumstances. I certainly shouldn’t blame any publisher who couldn’t. Should you?” “I? I blame nobody, my dear friend,” said Kane. “That is the way I keep my temper. I should not blame you if Chapley & Co. declined your book, and you went to the rest of the trade carefully concealing from each publisher, the fact that he was not the first you had approached with it.” Ray laughed, but he winced, too. “I suppose that’s what I should have to do. But Chapley & Co. haven’t declined it yet.” “Ah, I’m glad of that. Not that you could really impose upon any one. There would be certain infallible signs in your manuscript that would betray you: an air of use; little private marks and memoranda of earlier readers; the smell of their different brands of tobacco and sachet powder.” “I shouldn’t try to impose upon any one,” Ray began, with a flush of indignation, which ended in shame. “What would _you_ do under the same circumstances?” he demanded, with desperation.