Millner smothered another smile.  “We’ll have lots of talks, I hope.”

“Oh, if you can spare the time—!” said Draper, almost humbly.

“Why, I shall be there on tap!”

“For father, not me.”  Draper hesitated, with another self-confessing smile.  “Father thinks I talk too much—­that I keep going in and out of things.  He doesn’t believe in analyzing:  he thinks it’s destructive.  But it hasn’t destroyed my ideals.”  He looked wistfully up and down the clanging street.  “And that’s the main thing, isn’t it?  I mean, that one should have an Ideal.”  He turned back almost gaily to Millner.  “I suspect you’re a revolutionist too!”

“Revolutionist?  Rather!  I belong to the Red Syndicate and the Black Hand!” Millner joyfully assented.

Young Draper chuckled at the enormity of the joke.  “First rate!  We’ll have incendiary meetings!” He pulled an elaborately armorial watch from his enfolding furs.  “I’m so sorry, but I must say good-bye—­this is my street,” he explained.  Millner, with a faint twinge of envy, glanced across at the colonnaded marble edifice in the farther corner.  “Going to the club?” he said carelessly.

His companion looked surprised.  “Oh, no:  I never go there.  It’s too boring.”  And he brought out, after one of the pauses in which he seemed rather breathlessly to measure the chances of his listener’s indulgence:  “I’m just going over to a little Bible Class I have in Tenth Avenue.”

Millner, for a moment or two, stood watching the slim figure wind its way through the mass of vehicles to the opposite corner; then he pursued his own course down Fifth Avenue, measuring his steps to the rhythmic refrain:  “It’s too easy—­it’s too easy—­it’s too easy!”

His own destination being the small shabby flat off University Place where three tender females awaited the result of his mission, he had time, on the way home, after abandoning himself to a general sense of triumph, to dwell specifically on the various aspects of his achievement.  Viewed materially and practically, it was a thing to be proud of; yet it was chiefly on aesthetic grounds—­because he had done so exactly what he had set out to do—­that he glowed with pride at the afternoon’s work.  For, after all, any young man with the proper “pull” might have applied to Orlando G. Spence for the post of secretary, and even have penetrated as far as the great man’s study; but that he, Hugh Millner, should not only have forced his way to this fastness, but have established, within a short half hour, his right to remain there permanently:  well, this, if it proved anything, proved that the first rule of success was to know how to live up to one’s principles.

“One must have a plan—­one must have a plan,” the young man murmured, looking with pity at the vague faces which the crowd bore past him, and feeling almost impelled to detain them and expound his doctrine.  But the planlessness of average human nature was of course the measure of his opportunity; and he smiled to think that every purposeless face he met was a guarantee of his own advancement, a rung in the ladder he meant to climb.