As he stepped in through the jail-like doorway he all but stumbled over Repellier, waiting for him there.
"I was down in this part of town," he explained, "so I decided to drop in on you for a while—I have a model who hangs out in Chatham Street."
"Come up; come up, by all means," cried Hartley, elated.
As the younger man and his visitor picked their way through the narrow halls of the tenement-house it was obvious to them both that the supper hour of that district was not yet over. For the smell of many cooking and overcooked meals, mingling with the odors that drifted at all times of the day up through the crowded building, was not altogether pleasing to the uninitiated nose. Repellier noticed, too, that Hartley looked listless and worn and tired, and in some way strangely altered.
This was the gilded youth he had once beheld in a cushion-bestrewn punt on the Isis, reading Anacreon. Groping after him up the odoriferous narrow stairs, with a sudden deeper note of sympathy he asked Hartley how he had been getting along of late.
"Five editorial rejections to-day," the young man answered half blithely, half solemnly.
"But are you getting—what you expected out of things down here?"
"As you see"—Hartley tried to laugh back, bravely enough—"I'm afraid I'm a sort of Zeno ground in my own mortar of squalidness."
Repellier knew as well as he how, with time, the novelty of such things could lose its early glitter. The old artist felt troubled in spirit.
"Will you take my advice for a second time?" he asked suddenly.