For some time Perry Blair had been finding this hard to understand. The adulation had been so overwhelming at first, so whole-hearted and seeming sincere one brief year before. Why, even six months back he could not have stood there thus, a tenth as long, before the copper name-shield of the Claridge, without collecting about him a fawning, favor-hunting throng so dense, so tenacious, and troublesome to traffic that it would have brought the officer from his place beside the surface-car tracks, caustic-tongued, to investigate and disperse it. Nor would that officer have ordered them to move on, six months before, once he had discovered what monarch it was who held informal court there. He would have paused for a bluff joke or two himself, a knowing word of importance, before returning to loose his indignation upon some luckless wight of a family man, self-conscious and clumsy in what is known as a tin lizzie. They had hailed him so noisily, so elatedly, press and public alike. That the latter had fawned and flattered should have warned him what to expect, later on, but it did not. The greater wonder is that it did not go to his head a little. It seemed it couldn't help but do that. It had been so sudden. Mediocrity one day, and obscurity. Mediocrity--and then world's champion, and the fierce white light which beats upon a throne! Of course there had been some to sneer. Here and there one had arisen to point out that Fanchette, the man whom he had whipped in one round, had been but a shell of a man, champion in name only, for a long, long time. They said the victory proved nothing. They said that Perry Blair had just been lucky, that was all; lucky in being selected as the one least calculated to damage Fanchette after a whole year in which the latter had steadfastly refused to fight. Lucky in having that fox, Devereau, for a manager, cunning enough to decoy Fanchette into the ring. But in the main they swarmed to his standard. The king was dead. And he had lingered tediously, at that. The newspapers welcomed Perry avidly. Fanchette as a subject for copy had long been profitless as a sucked orange. Here again was the novelty of newness and a personality of exceeding richness and color. Or at least so ran report. No crack men had been sent out to cover the affair. That such an astounding thing as the rise of a new champion threatened had been foreseen by few. In the East Perry Blair had been little known and reckoned a third-rater. But those who had been West to see the bout which ended so suddenly brought back fragments which put a nice edge upon the imaginations of the sporting editors. And immediately, when in reality there was no need, had begun the well-known process of gilding the lily.