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"Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any of our little social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in his own picture of her

"H'er places, I suppose," the other commented "Well, here's my corner"

He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after hi on his last words

Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were theabout him, and always made Archer wonder why they had allowed hie when

Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never seen them The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of journalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett had proposed to go for a bock He had given Archer to understand that his as an invalid; which htclothes, or in both Winsett hie abhorrence of social observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to consider that cleanliness and coarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring "Boheed their clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on the number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less self-conscious than the others Nevertheless, he was always stiht of the journalist's lean bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout hi talk

Winsett was not a journalist by choice He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for , and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks

On the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young iven up His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities e of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism