"Oh my!" said Horner, "but, you know, that won't do. It isn't a safe district, that. What took you there?"
"Poverty, to be frank," said Arthur. "I find it necessary to choose the cheapest lodging I can find."
"But it won't do," said the little man gravely. He meditated for a moment, as if not quite sure of how to express what he wished to say. "Englishmen should stand together, shouldn't they?" he remarked at last. "Now look here, suppose you come to my rooms. You'll be very welcome. I can give you a shake-down of some sort, and to-morrow we'll talk over that book. I really shall be very much gratified if you'll come."
The offer was made with such unaffected kindness that Arthur's heart warmed toward the little man. He had already received a hard lesson in life that day, and it had left his heart sore and bitter. Here was another kind of lesson. A man whom the world had not used generously or perhaps justly, a total stranger, who had seen enough of the seamy side of life to make him reasonably suspicious or even cynical, was ready to share what he had with him on the mere ground of common nationality. "Englishmen should stand together," he had said, and was instantly prepared to act upon that simple ethic, although for all he knew the man to whom he offered hospitality might be a rascal or a thief. Such a lesson at such a moment was calculated to restore faith in human nature, faith in that radical goodness of the human heart which is the base of all decent living.
"Mr. Horner," he said, "I accept your offer thankfully. You don't know how much you've done for me by making it. I shall never forget it."
"Oh! that's all right," said the little man, with a deprecating gesture. "I've only done what I'd like some one to do for me." And he did not seem to be aware that the words uttered so carelessly, as if they expressed nothing more than the most ordinary commonplace, really contained the sum of all religion.
Arthur went home with his new friend, and found that his rooms consisted of a littered studio in one of the older houses of New York.
"When I'm doing pretty well, I always stay in a hotel," said Horner, "but at a pinch one can sleep here."
"Why apologise?" said Arthur. "Why, man, you have something here that the best hotel in New York can't give you. You've an open fireplace. It's like coming home again to see that."
"Yes," said Horner, with a whimsical air of wisdom, "the decay of marriage and the family in America dates from the hot-air register and the steam-heating business. People who never sit round an open fire never get a chance of knowing one another. I never had much of a home myself. I had to start out working pretty early; but there's one thing I never forget, and that's the open fire round which we kids sat on winter nights while mother told us stories. I used to see things in that fire—castles, and sunsets, and burning ships, like most kids do. But I wanted to paint 'em, and if it hadn't been for those times in the firelight I'd never have been an artist. But O Lor', look at these Americans!—the women standing over hot-air registers with their clothes blown out like balloons when they want to get warm, and the men getting as close as they can to a fizzling coil of steam-pipes. I don't call that being civilised, do you? It's a beastly way of living, I call it."