ore than ever.

I remember well how Stanton, the biggest-hearted fellow the Lord ever
let live, announced one night in the copy room that he was going to get
Shelby tight or die in the attempt, and how loud a laugh went up at his
expense.

"It can't be done," was the verdict.

The man hadn't enough humanity, we figured. He was forever dramatizing
himself, forever attitudinizing. And those various suits of his--how
they agonized us! We were slouches, I know, with rumpled hair and, I
fear not overparticular as to our linen during the greater part of the
week. Some of us had families to support, even in those young days--or
at least a father or a mother up the State to whom we had to send a
monthly cheque out of our meagre wages.

I can't say that we were envious of Shelby because of his
single-blessedness--he was only twenty-two at that time; but it hurt us
to know that he didn't really have to work in Herald Square, and that he
had neat bachelor quarters down in Gramercy Park, and a respectable club
or two, and week-ended almost where he chose. His blond hair was always
beautifully plastered over a fine brow, and he would never soil his
forehead by wearing a green shade when he bent over his typewriter late
at night. That would have robbed him of some of his dignity, made him
look anything but the English gentleman he was so anxious to appear.

I think he looked upon us as just so much dust beneath his feet. He
would say "Good evening" in a way that irritated every one of us--as
though the words had to be got out somehow, and he might as well say
them and get them over with, and as though he dreaded any reply. You
couldn't have slapped him on the back even if you had felt the impulse;
he wasn't the to-be-slapped kind. And of course that means that he
wouldn't have slapped any of us, either. And he was the type you
couldn't call by his first name.

Looking back, I sometimes think of all that he missed in the way of
good-fellowship; for we were the most decent staff in New York, as
honest and generous and warmly human a bunch as anyone could hope to
find. We were ambitious, too, mostly college men, and we had that
passion for good writing, perhaps not in ourselves, but in others, which
is so often the newspaper man's special endowment. We were swift to
recognize a fine passage in one another's copy; and praise from old
Hanscher meant a royal little dinner at Engel's with mugs of cream ale,
and an hour's difference i