"Several reasons. It's pretty arbitrary--it looks a little like a combination in restraint of trade, although company organizations in a lot of states have separation rules. But I doubt whether the Eastern Conference has the backbone to put such a rule in effect. Besides, it's scarcely worth while as things now stand--almost all the good companies are in the Conference, and as for the rest, they're either used to them or they feel they're hardly worth bothering about." "But the Guardian is, isn't it?" "Yes," said Smith, thoughtfully, "I suppose it is. Still, what good would it do O'Connor? That's what I keep coming back to, because I'm absolutely certain he wouldn't have put this thing through without some personal end in sight." "Might not he be disinterested, for once?" "Not O'Connor," said Smith, dryly. "But good heavens! haven't we talked intrigues and cabals and plots long enough? There are one or two other things in life, you know--I've hardly given you a chance to speak, and I've been holding forth like an unsuccessful detective reporting to his superior officer." And the conversation drifted into other channels. A great city is a wonderful place in a thousand ways, not the least of which is its magical influence upon human relationships. Perhaps its mere size, the multiplicity of its sights and sounds, its effect of isolating an individual in the midst of an almost impenetrable throng--perhaps these things are chiefly responsible. But it is certain that, in common with the desert and the sea, a city like London or Paris or New York carries in its very atmosphere a sense of almost devotional reality, of almost the pure essence of life. In the very shrine of the unreal and the artificial, reality grips with a power elsewhere unknown. Beyond all the curious striving for the immaterial, the sense of the utter futility of that very effort becomes wholly clear. Follies and affectations may be sought with added fervor for the mind and the body, but the want of them is stilled in the soul. Since this is so, in the very home of conventions and conventionalities these artificial ideas become more palpably ridiculous. Surrounded by needless man-made fetters, one sees them to be inane. The wind that blows between the worlds blows in the world's great cities, and it blows, for their lovers at least, the cobwebs from the heart. What is natural is seen to be right, and what is real is seen to be true.