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?"