It was Norman Benson. I recognized his quaint way of expressing things, before she came to his name.
"I know him," I laughed.
I had to tell her all about our short acquaintance.
"Why don't you ask him to come up and see you?"
I did not feel that I knew him well enough to bother him. I had not seen him nor heard from him for three years.
The first thing in the morning, without letting me know, she telephoned him of my plight. About eleven o'clock, to my immense surprise, Miss Wright brought him to my room.
Benson was the busiest man I have ever known. In later years when I roomed with him and was his most intimate friend, I could never keep track of half his activities. He was a sort of "consulting engineer" in advertising. Big concerns all over the country would send for him and pay well to have him attract the attention of the public to some new product. He could write the Spotless Town kind of verses while eating breakfast, and although he did not take art seriously, he drew some of the most successful advertisements of his time. One year he earned about thirty thousand dollars, above his inherited income of ten thousand. He did not spend more than five thousand a year on himself, but he was always hard up.
He was director of half a hundred philanthropies—settlements, day-nurseries, immigrant homes, children's societies, and so forth. His pet hobby was the "Arbeiter Studenten Verein." When he did not entirely support these enterprises, he paid the yearly deficit. It was such expenses which pushed him into the advertising work he detested.
It was a wonder to me how, in spite of these manifold activities, he found time for the thousand and one little kindnesses, the varied personal relations he maintained with all sorts and conditions of men. Once a week or so he dined at the University Club, more often at the settlement, and the other nights he took pot-luck on the top floor of some tenement with one of his Arbeiter Studenten. In the same way he found time to remember me and bring cheer into the hospital.
That first morning, in speaking of the newspaper story, I asked him if he was a socialist.