but a ghost may still claim some privileges of memory, and
my friends would be hospitable to you. Only, I strongly suspect that you
would not use the letters if I gave them. You prefer to make your own
start; isn't it so? Well; I have written to a few. Sooner or later you
will meet with them. Those things always happen even in New York.... Be
sure to write me all about the job when you get it--

Prudence dictated that he should be earning something before he invested
in expensive apparel, be it never so desirable and important. However,
he would outfit himself just as soon as a regular earning capacity
justified his going into his carefully husbanded but dwindling savings.
He pictured himself clad as a lily of the field, unconscious of
perfection as Herbert Cressey himself, in the public haunts of fashion
and ease; through which vision there rose the searing prospect of thus
encountering Io Welland. What was her married name? He had not even
asked when the news was broken to him; had not wanted to ask; was done
with all that for all time.

He was still pathetically young and inexperienced. And he had been badly
hurt.

CHAPTER II

Dust was the conspicuous attribute of the place. It lay, flat and
toneless, upon the desk, the chairs, the floor; it streaked the walls.
The semi-consumptive office "boy's" middle-aged shoulders collected it.
It stirred in the wake of quiet-moving men, mostly under thirty-five,
who entered the outer door, passed through the waiting-room, and
disappeared behind a partition. Banneker felt like shaking himself lest
he should be eventually buried under its impalpable sifting. Two hours
and a half had passed since he had sent in his name on a slip of paper,
to Mr. Gordon, managing editor of the paper. On the way across Park Row
he had all but been persuaded by a lightning printer on the curb to have
a dozen tasty and elegant visiting-cards struck off, for a quarter; but
some vague inhibition of good taste checked him. Now he wondered if a
card would have served better.

While he waited, he checked up the actuality of a metropolitan newspaper
entrance-room, as contrasted with his notion of it, derived from motion
pictures. Here was none of the bustle and hurry of the screen. No brisk
and earnest young figures with tense eyes and protruding notebooks
darted feverishly in and out; nor, in the course of his long wait, had
he seen so much as one specimen of that invariable concomitant of all