“Oh, let’s get on with the story,” he urged. But Pinkerton for long remained for him an ideal, because he was “smart” and “alive.”

“I’m not long very many of art,” he announced. “But I believe that any art that don’t make the world better and happier is no art at all, and is only fit for the dump heap.”

But at last Laura found his abiding affinity in Howells.

“Nothing much happens,” he said. “But I know all those people.” He never could rid himself of a surreptitious admiration for Bartley Hubbard. He, too, was “smart” and “alive.” He had the “get there” to him. “Why,” he would say, “I know fifty boys just like him down there in La Salle Street.” Lapham he loved as a brother. Never a point in the development of his character that he missed or failed to chuckle over. Bromfield Cory was poohed and boshed quite out of consideration as a “loafer,” a “dilletanty,” but Lapham had all his sympathy.