And so that editorial office soon became a nest of confusion.  The walls were lined with bookshelves and a quaint assortment of books, old and new, populated not only these, but the floor, the two tables, the roll-top desk, and here and there a chair.  White paper began to heap up in the corners.  Magazines—­“my contemporaries,” said the proud editor—­began their limitless flood.  And the matting on the floor was soon worn through by Joe’s perpetual pacing.

The whole home, however, began to have atmosphere—­personality.  There was something open, hospitable, warm about it—­something comfortable and livable.

Among the first things Joe did was to procure two assistants.  One was the bookkeeper, Nathan Slate, a lean and dangling individual, who collapsed over his high desk in the corner like a many-bladed penknife.  He was thin and cadaverous, and spoke in a meek and melancholy voice, studied and slow.  He dressed in black and tried to suppress his thin height by stooping low and hanging his head.  The other addition was Billy, the office-boy, a sharp, bright youth with red hair and brilliant blue eyes.

There was much else to do.  For instance, there were the money affairs to get in shape.  Joe secured a five-per-cent mortgage with his capital.  Marty Briggs paid down two thousand cash and was to pay two thousand a year and interest.  So Joe could figure his income at somewhat over six thousand dollars, and, as he hoped that he and his mother would use not more than fifteen hundred a year, or, at the most, two thousand, he felt he had plenty to throw into his enterprise.

Among the first things that Joe discovered was a gift of his own temperament.  He was a born crowd-man, a “mixer.”  He found he could instantly assume the level of the man he talked with, and that his tongue knew no hindrance.  Thought flowed easily into speech.  This gave him a freedom among men, a sense of belonging anywhere, and singled him out from the rest.  It gave him, too, the joy of expression—­the joy of throwing out his thought and getting its immediate reaction in other lives.  Yet he understood perfectly the man who seemed shy and recluse, who was choked-off before strangers, and who yet burned to be a democrat, to give and take, to share alien lives, to be of the moving throng of life.  Such a man was the victim either of a wrong education, an education of repression that discouraged any personal display, or he had a twist in his temperament.  Joe, who began to be well aware of his gift, used it without stint and found that it had a contagious quality—­it loosened other people up; it unfolded their shy and secret petals like sun heat on a bud; it made the desert of personality blossom like the rose.  He warmed the life about him because he could express himself.

So it was not hard for Joe to shift to this new neighborhood and become absorbed in its existence.  Tradespeople, idlers, roomers and landlady in the house accepted him at once and felt as if they had known him all their lives.  By a power almost of intuition he probed their obscure histories and entered into their destinies.