n our arrival at the office next day. Oh,
happy, vanished times! Magic moments that peeped through the grayness of
hard work, and made the whole game so worth while.

Well, Stanton won out. He told us about it afterwards.

On the pretext that he wanted to ask Shelby's advice about some
important personal matter, he urged him to let him give him as good a
meal as Mouqin could provide, with a certain vintage of French wine
which he knew Shelby was fond of. There were cocktails to begin with,
though Shelby had intimated more than once that he abominated the
bourgeois American habit of indulging in such poison. And there was an
onion soup _au gratin_, a casserole, and artichokes, and special coffee,
and I don't know what else.

"He got positively human," Stanton put it, later, as we clustered round
him in the copy room. (Shelby hadn't turned up.) "I don't like him, you
know; and at first it was hard to get through the soup; but I acted up,
gave him a song and dance about my mythical business matter--I think he
feared I was going to 'touch him'--and finally got a little tipsy
myself. From then on it was easy. It was like a game."

It seems that afterwards, arm in arm, they walked out into Sixth Avenue
in the soft snow--it was winter, and the Burgundy had done the
trick--and Shelby, his inhibitions completely gone, began to weep.

"Why are you crying?" Stanton asked, his own voice thick.

"Because you fellers don't like me!" Shelby choked out.

The accent and the stick went together into the gutter, Stanton
laughingly told us. An immortal moment! The poseur with his mask off, at
last! Beneath all that grease-paint and charlatanism there was a solid,
suffering, lonely man; and even in his own dazed condition Stanton was
quick to recognize it, and to rejoice in the revelation.

Moreover, he was flattered, as we always are, when our judgments have
proved right. Stanton had deliberately set out to find the real
Shelby--and he had.

"A man who can write as he can has something in him--that I know," he
had said generously more than once. He made us see that he had not been
wrong.

But it was not the real Shelby that returned to the office. That is
where he missed his great opportunity. Back strutted the pompous,
stained-glass, pitiful imitation of an Englishman, in a louder suit than
ever, and with a big new cane that made the old one look flimsy.

We despised him more than ever. For we would have taken him within our