There came to the restaurant where Dickie worked, a certain sallow and irritable man, no longer in his early youth. He came daily for one of his three meals: it might be lunch or dinner or even breakfast, Dickie was always in haste to serve him. For some reason, the man's clever and nervous personality intrigued his interest. And this, although his customer never threw him a glance, scowled at a newspaper, barked out an order, gulped his food, stuck a fair-sized tip under the edge of his plate, and jerked himself away.

On a certain sluggish noon hour in August, Dickie, as far as the kitchen door with a tray balanced on his palm, realized that he had forgotten this man's order. He hesitated to go back. "Like as not," reasoned Dickie, "he didn't rightly know what the order was. He never does look at his food. I'll fetch him a Spanish omelette and a salad and a glass of iced tea. It's a whole lot better order than he'd have thought of himself."

Nevertheless, it was with some trepidation that he set the omelette down before that lined and averted countenance. Its owner was screwed into his chair as usual, eyes, with a sharp cleft between their brows, bent on his folded newspaper, and he put his right hand blindly on the fork. But as it pricked the contents of the plate a savory fragrance rose and the reader looked.

"Here, you damn fool—that's not my order," he snapped out.

Dickie tasted a homely memory—"Dickie damn fool." He stood silent a moment looking down with one of his quaint, impersonal looks.

"Well, sir," then he said slowly, "it ain't your order, but you look a whole lot more like a feller that would order Spanish omelette than like a feller that would order Hamburger steak."

For the first time the man turned about, flung his arm over his chair-back, and looked up at Dickie. In fact, he stared. His thin lips, enclosed in an ill-tempered parenthesis of double lines, twisted themselves slightly.

"I'll be derned!" he said. "But, look here, my man, I didn't order
Hamburger steak; I ordered chicken."

Dickie deliberately smoothed down the cowlick on his head. He wore his look of a seven-year-old with which he was wont to face the extremity of Sylvester's exasperation.

"I reckon I clean forgot your order, sir," he said. "I figured out that you wouldn't be caring what was on your plate. This heat," he added, "sure puts a blinder on a feller's memory."

The man laughed shortly. "It's all right," he said. "This'll go down."

He ate in silence. Then he glanced up again. "What are you waiting for, anyway?"

Dickie flushed faintly. "I was sort of wishful to see how it would go down."

"Oh, I don't mean that kind of waiting. I mean—why are you a waiter in this—hash-hole?"

Dickie meditated. "There ain't no answer to that," he said. "I don't know why—" He added—"Why anything. It's a sort of extry word in the dictionary—don't mean much any way you look at it."

He gathered up the dishes. The man watched him, tilting back a little in his chair, his eyes twinkling under brows drawn together. A moment afterwards he left the restaurant.

It was a few nights later when Dickie saw him again—or rather when Dickie was again seen by him. This time Dickie was not in the restaurant. He was at a table in a small Free Library near Greenwich Avenue, and he was copying painstakingly with one hand from a fat volume which he held down with the other. The strong, heavily-shaded light made a circle of brilliance about him; his fair hair shone silvery bright, his face had a sort of seraphic pallor. The orderer of chicken, striding away from the desk with a hastily obtained book of reference, stopped short and stared at him; then came close and touched the thin, shiny shoulder of the blue serge coat.

"This the way you take your pleasure?" he asked abruptly.

Dickie looked up slowly, and his consciousness seemed to travel even more slowly back from the fairy doings of a midsummer night. Under the observant eyes bent upon it, his face changed extraordinarily from the face of untroubled, almost immortal childhood to the face of struggling and reserved manhood.

"Hullo," he said with a smile of recognition. "Well—yes—not always."

"What are you reading?" The man slipped into the chair beside Dickie, put on his glasses, and looked at the fat book. "Poetry? Hmp! What are you copying it for?—letter to your girl?"

Dickie had all the Westerner's prejudice against questions, but he felt drawn to this patron of the "hash-hole," so, though he drawled his answer slightly, it was an honest answer.

"It ain't my book," he said. "That's why I'm copying it."

"Why in thunder don't you take it out, you young idiot?"

Dickie colored. "Well, sir, I don't rightly understand the workings of this place. I come by it on the way home and I kep' a-seein' folks goin' in with books and comin' out with books. I figured it was a kind of exchange proposition. I've only got one book—and that ain't rightly mine—" the man looking at him wondered why his face flamed—"so, when I came in, I just watched and I figured you could read here if you had the notion to take down a book and fetch it over to the table and copy from it and return it. So I've been doin' that."

"Why didn't you go to the desk, youngster, and ask questions?"

"Where I come from"—Dickie was drawling again—"folks don't deal so much in questions as they do here."

"Where you came from! You came from Mars! Come along to the desk and I'll fix you up with a card and you can take an armful of poetry home with you."

Dickie went to the desk and signed his name. The stranger signed his—Augustus Lorrimer. The librarian stamped a bit of cardboard and stuck it into the fat volume. She handed it to Dickie wearily.

"Thank you, ma'am," he said with such respectful fervor that she looked up at him and smiled.

"Now, where's your diggings," asked Lorrimer, who had taken no hints about asking questions, "east or west?" He was a newspaper reporter.

"Would you be carin' to walk home with me?" asked Dickie. There was a great deal of dignity in his tone, more in his carriage.

"Yes. I'd be caring to! Lead on, Martian!" And Lorrimer felt, after he said that, that he was a vulgarian—a long-forgotten sensation. "In Mars," he commented to himself, "this young man was some kind of a prince."

"What do you look over your shoulder that way for, Dick?" he asked aloud, a few blocks on their way. "Scared the police will take away your book?"

Dickie blinked at him with a startled air. "Did I? I reckon a feller gets into queer ways when he's alone a whole lot. I get kind of feelin' like somebody was following me in this town—so many folks goin' to and fro does it to me most likely."

"Yes, a fellow does get into queer ways when he's alone a whole lot," said Lorrimer slowly. His mind went back a dozen years to his own first winter in New York. He looked with keenness at Dickie's face. It was a curiously charming face, he thought, but it was tight-knit with a harried, struggling sort of look, and this in spite of its quaint detachment.

"Know any one in this city?"

"No, sir, not rightly. I've made acquaintance with some of the waiters.
They've asked me to join a club. But I haven't got the cash."

"What pay do you draw?"

Dickie named a sum.

"Not much, eh? But you've got your tips."

"Yes, sir. I pay my board with my pay and live on the tips."

"Must be uncertain kind of living! Where do you live, anyway?
What? Here?"

They had crossed Washington Square and were entering a tall studio building to the south and east. Dickie climbed lightly up the stairs. Lorrimer followed with a feeling of bewilderment. On the top landing, dimly lighted, Dickie unlocked a door and stood aside.

"Just step in and look up," he said, "afore I light the light. You'll see something."

Lorrimer obeyed. A swarm of golden bees glimmered before his eyes.

"Stars," said Dickie. "Down below you wouldn't hardly know you had 'em, would you?"

Lorrimer did not answer. A moment later an asthmatic gas-jet caught its breath and he saw a bare studio room almost vacant of furniture. There was a bed and a screen and a few chairs, one window facing an alley wall. The stars had vanished.

"Pretty palatial quarters for a fellow on your job," Lorrimer remarked.
"How did you happen to get here?"

"Some—people I knowed of once lived here." Dickie's voice had taken on a
certain remoteness, and even Lorrimer knew that here questions stopped.
He accepted a chair, declined "the makings," proffered a cigarette.
During these amenities his eyes flew about the room.

"Good Lord!" he ejaculated, "is all that stuff your copying?"

There was a pile of loose and scattered manuscript upon the table under the gas-jet.

"Yes, sir," Dickie smiled. "I was plumb foolish to go to all that labor."

Lorrimer drew near to the table and coolly looked over the papers. Dickie watched him with rather a startled air and a flush that might have seemed one of resentment if his eyes had not worn their impersonal, observing look.

"All poetry," muttered Lorrimer. "But some of it only a line—or a word." He read aloud,—"'Close to the sun in lonely lands—' what's that from, anyway?"

"A poem about an eagle by a man named Alfred Tennyson. Ain't it the way a feller feels, though, up on the top of a rocky peak?"

"Never been on the top of a rocky peak—kind of a sky-scraper sensation, isn't it? What's all this—'An' I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, after my fashion'?"

Dickie's face again flamed in spite of himself. "It's a love poem. The feller couldn't forget. He couldn't keep himself from loving that-away because he loved so much the other way—well, sir, you better read it for yourself. It's a mighty real sort of a poem—if you were that sort of a feller, I mean."

"And this is 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' And here's a sonnet, 'It was not like your great and gracious ways'—? Coventry Patmore. Well, young man, you've a catholic taste."

"I don't rightly belong to any church," said Dickie gravely. "My mother is a Methodist."

Lorrimer moved; abruptly away and moved abruptly back.

"Where were you educated, Dick?"

"I was raised in Millings"—Dickie named the Western State—"I didn't get only to grammar school. My father needed me to work in his hotel."

"Too bad!" sighed Lorrimer. "Well, I'll bid you good-night. And many thanks. You've got a fine place here." Again he sighed. "I dare say—one of these days—"

He was absent and irritable again. Dickie accompanied him down the three long, narrow flights and climbed back to his loneliness. He was, however, very much excited by his adventure, excited and disturbed. He felt restless. He walked about and whistled to himself.

Until now he had had but one companion—the thought of Sheila. It was extraordinary how immediate she was. During the first dreadful weeks of his drudgery in the stifling confusions of the restaurant, when even the memory of Sylvester's tongue-lashings faded under the acute reality of the head waiter's sarcasms, that love of his for Sheila had fled away and left him dull and leaden and empty of his soul. And his tiny third-story bedroom had seemed like a coffin when he laid himself down in it and tried to remember her. It had come to him like a mountain wind, overwhelmingly, irresistibly, the desire to live where she lived: the first wish he had had since he had learned that she was not to be found by him. And the miracle had accomplished itself. Mrs. Halligan had been instructed to get a lodger at almost any price for the long-vacant studio room. She lowered the rent to the exact limit of Dickie's wages. She had never bargained with so bright-eyed a hungry-looking applicant for lodgings. And that night he lay awake under Sheila's stars. From then on he lived always in her presence. And here in the room that had known her he kept himself fastidious and clean. He shut out the wolf-pack of his shrewd desires. The room was sanctuary. It was to rescue Sheila rather than himself that Dickie fled up to the stars. So deeply, so intimately had she become a part of him that he seemed to carry her soul in his hands. So had the young dreamer wedded his dream. He lived with Sheila as truly, as loyally, as though he knew that she would welcome him with one of those downward rushes or give him Godspeed on sultry, feverish dawns with a cool kiss. Dickie lay sometimes across his bed and drew her cheek in trembling fancy close to his until the anguish wet his pillow with mute tears.

Now to this dual loneliness Lorrimer had climbed, and Dickie felt, rather gratefully, that life had reached up to the aching unrealities of his existence. His tight and painful life had opened like the first fold of a fan. He built upon the promise of a friendship with this questioning, impertinent, mocking, keenly sympathetic visitor.

But a fortnight passed without Lorrimer's appearing at the restaurant and, when at last he did come, Dickie, flying to his chair, was greeted by a cold, unsmiling word, and a businesslike quotation from the menu. He felt as though he had been struck. His face burned. In the West, a fellow couldn't do that and get away with it! He tightened an impotent, thin fist. He filled the order and kept his distance, and, absurdly enough, gave Lorrimer's tip to another waiter and went without his own dinner. For the first time in his life a sense of social inferiority, of humiliation concerning the nature of his work, came to him. He felt the pang of servitude, a pang unknown to the inhabitants of frontier towns. When Sheila washed dishes for Mrs. Hudson she was "the young lady from Noo York who helps round at Hudson's house." Dickie fought this shame sturdily, but it seemed to cling, to have a sticky pervasiveness. Try as he might he couldn't brush it off his mind. Nevertheless, it was on the very heels of this embittering experience that life plucked him up from his slough. One of the leveling public catastrophes came to Dickie's aid—not that he knew he was a dumb prayer for aid. He knew only that every day was harder to face than the last, that every night the stars up there through Sheila's skylight seemed to glimmer more dully with less inspiration on his fagged spirit.

The sluggish monotony of the restaurant's existence was stirred that September night by a big neighboring fire. Waiters and guests tumbled out to the call of fire-engines and running feet. Dickie found himself beside Lorrimer, who caught him by the elbow.

"Keep by me, kid," he said, and there was something in his tone that softened injury. "If you want a good look-in, I can get through the ropes."

He showed his card to a policeman, pulled Dickie after him, and they found themselves in an inner circle of the inferno. Before them a tall, hideous warehouse broke forth into a horrible beauty. It was as though a tortured soul had burst bars. It roared and glowed and sent up petals of smoky rose and seeds of fire against the blue-black sky. The crowds pressed against the ropes and turned up their faces to drink in the terror of the spectacle.

Lorrimer had out his notebook. "Damn fires!" he said. "They bore me. Does all this look like anything to you? That fire and those people and their silly faces all tilted up and turned red and blue and purple—"

He was talking to himself, and so, really, was Dickie when he made his own statement in a queer tone of frightened awe. "They look like a flower garden in Hell," he whispered.

Lorrimer threw up his chin. "Say that again, will you?" he snapped out. "Go on! Don't stop! Tell me everything that comes into your damn young head of a wandering Martian! Fly at it! I'll take you down."

"You mean," said Dickie, "tell you what I think this looks like?"

"That's what I mean, do."

Dickie smiled a queer sort of smile. He had found a listener at last. A moment later Lorrimer's pencil was in rapid motion. And the reporter's eyes shot little stabbing looks at Dickie's unselfconscious face. When it was over he snapped an elastic round his notebook, returned it to his pocket, and laid his hand on Dickie's thin, tense arm.

"Come along with me, Dick," said Lorrimer. "You've won. I've been fighting you and my duty to my neighbor for a fortnight. Your waiter days are over. I've adopted you. I'm my brother's keeper all right. We'll both go hungry now and then probably, but what's the odds! I need you. I haven't been able to hand in a story like that for years. I'm a burnt-out candle and you're the divine fire. I'm going to educate the life out of you. I'm going to train you till you wish you'd died young and ungrammatical in Millings. I may not be much good myself," he added solemnly, "but God gave me the sense to know the real thing when I see it. I've been fighting you, calling myself a fool for weeks. Come along, young fellow, don't hang back, and for your credit's sake close your lips so you won't look like a case of arrested development. First we'll say good-bye to the hash-hole and the white apron and then I'll take you up to your sky parlor and we'll talk things over."

"God!" said Dickie faintly. It was a prayer for some enlightenment.