“What are you reading?” The man slipped into the chair beside Dickie, put on his glasses, and looked at the fat book.  “Poetry?  Hmp!  What are you copying it for?—­letter to your girl?”

Dickie had all the Westerner’s prejudice against questions, but he felt drawn to this patron of the “hash-hole,” so, though he drawled his answer slightly, it was an honest answer.

“It ain’t my book,” he said.  “That’s why I’m copying it.”

“Why in thunder don’t you take it out, you young idiot?”

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?”

Dickie blinked at him with a startled air.  “Did I?  I reckon a feller gets into queer ways when he’s alone a whole lot.  I get kind of feelin’ like somebody was following me in this town—­so many folks goin’ to and fro does it to me most likely.”

“Yes, a fellow does get into queer ways when he’s alone a whole lot,” said Lorrimer slowly.  His mind went back a dozen years to his own first winter in New York.  He looked with keenness at Dickie’s face.  It was a curiously charming face, he thought, but it was tight-knit with a harried, struggling sort of look, and this in spite of its quaint detachment.