They pursued the stranger down the corridor, overhauling him at the entrance of the cafe.
"The Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby, I believe," said the political reporter, lifting his hat, and naming the newspaper he represented. His companion, who looked like a broker, but whose present mission was to screw copy out of hotel arrivals, followed his example, and the group was almost immediately increased by three more well-dressed cosmopolitans with ingratiating manners and a scent for news.
Five New York reporters hanging on his words! To achieve this giddy pinnacle on the heels of calling himself an atom seemed to Shelby almost to pass belief. Somehow he rallied.
"Gentlemen," he beamed, "I'm glad to see you. Have a drink."
No liquor distilled could add to Shelby's intoxication. It was not reporting, this swift interchange of trenchant thought between men of the world; or if reporting, a sublimated sort, free of note-books and the disconcerting trademarks of the guild as he had known it elsewhere.
"I can't understand the hostility felt by some public men for the press," he remarked, thumbs in armholes, coat lapels thrown benignly back. "Our relations, I take it, should be confidential."
Practice followed precept, and in that delightful atmosphere Shelby's confidences flowered like young May. Tuscarora County was put through its paces for a gaping world; Clinton's Ditch—"well-spring of New York's commercial supremacy, gentlemen"—shown in rosiest apotheosis; the Empire State pedestalled imperially among the nations. Nor could his versatility be bounded by politics alone. The inevitable allusion to Bernard Graves's poem involved literature, and to stand, as he did, under the same roof with the nymphs who had long bodied forth his pictorial ideal, was to invite a public avowal of his proposed championship of free art. He was lured the farther into this quagmire by the guileless questioning of one of his listeners, who lingered in obvious fascination after his fellows had departed, and, in happy ignorance that the cherubic youth was the son of an artist of distinction, and himself no mean critic of things artistic, Shelby voiced opinions more vigorous than discreet.
"There was a time," he confessed apropos of the nymphs, "when I thought those ladies the best ever. Young eyes won't hesitate between a plump Venus and a lean Madonna."
"And now?"
"Well, I haven't altogether renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil, but my taste has changed. A good animal picture fetches me,—something like Rosa What's-her-name's 'Horse Fair' you've got up-town in Central Park. I call that big art."