“Baxter has just been in here ... he’s writing us a sensational novel exposing society.  He spoke to me about you,” Lephil remarked,—­“said he wished we’d put a tag on you and ship you down to his Eden colony.”

There was a pause.  Miss Martin thoughtfully tapped her forehead with a pencil.

“I don’t think it would be good for Johnnie to go down to Eden and put up with Penton,” she interjected, “they’re too much alike.”

“Ally Merton is in New York,” Galusha Siddon informed me.  “He’s working on the Express.  He wants you to run down and see him.”

* * * * *

Merton had come to New York the year before, to work on the Express.  Mackworth had gotten him the job.  Ally was as meticulously dressed as ever.  His eyes swept me from head to foot, with an instinctive glance of appraisal, as he shook hands.

“Come on up on the roof.  The paper wants a photo of you ... to go with a story I’m writing about you.”

* * * * *

I rather resented all my friends’ way of talking to me, as if I were a child to be discussed, ordered about, and disposed of.  But I humoured them by playing up to their patronising spirit ... even playing horse with them continually on the sly, and having lots of fun that they didn’t suspect.

* * * * *

The next morning I was in the office of the Independent, visiting with the literary editor, good old Dr. William Hayes Ward.  He was a man of eighty years ... a scholar in English and the Greek and Latin classics....

Once, when on a vacation he had written me that, as pastime, he had read the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey over again.  In the Greek, of course.

His abused eyes floated uneasily behind a double pair of lenses ... a dissenting minister ... of the old school ... he seemed to me far more youthful, more invigorating, than any of my other more youthful friends in the literary and magazine world.

We talked and talked of poetry.  He brought down a huge treatise on English versification, translated from some German scholar’s life-research—­to prove a point ... he discussed what Sidney Lanier—­whom he had known—­might have done with metrics, had he only lived longer....

And “no ... no ... take my advice,” he said, “don’t go down to Eden.”  There was something so vaguely deprecatory in his voice that it brought from me the question—­“why not? isn’t Penton Baxter all right?”

“Oh, yes,” in the same deprecatory tone,—­“he’s all right enough, alone—­but, together, you’d be like two balloons without ballast.  He might get you, or you might get him, into some sort of mess.”

“Why Dr. Ward, what do you mean?”

“Penton is always protesting about something or other,—­always starting fantastic schemes ... he’s just finished with his Parnassus Palace experiment, which brought him a lot of newspaper notoriety ... which is to me distasteful, extremely distasteful ... yet Baxter,” he added hastily, “is a real force ... he can think of more original projects in a given space of time than anyone else I know.”