“What papers are you boys with?” he inquired easily, merging himself at once with the party.

One man told him—­and looked him up and down.  “Thought I knew all the fellows,” added the speaker, a middle-aged man, “but never ran into you before.  What’s your rag?”

“‘Town Gossip,’” replied the agreeable young gentleman.

“’Town Gossip’!” The old reporter gave a grunt of contempt.  “And you’ve come to interview Mrs. De Peyster?”

“Yes.”

“First time I ever knew that leprous scandal-scavenger and black-hander to send a man out in the open to get a story.”  Evidently the old reporter, whom the others addressed as “colonel,” had by his long service acquired the privilege of surly out-spokenness.  “Thought ‘Town Gossip’ specialized in butlers and ladies’ maids and such—­or faked up its dope in the office.”

“This is something special.”  The young gentleman’s smiling but unpresuming camaraderie seemed unruffled by the colonel’s blunt contempt, and though they all drew apart from him he seemed to be untroubled by his journalistic ostracism.

The next moment the door was opened by a stout, short-breathed woman, hat, jacket, and black gloves on.  All stepped in.  The three late-arriving reporters, seeing in the reception-room beyond a group of newspapermen about a servant,—­Matilda making her first futile effort to rid the house of this pestilential horde, generaled by Mr. Mayfair,—­started quickly toward the members of their fraternity.  But the young gentleman remained behind with their stout admitter.

“Huh—­thought that was really your size—­tackling a servant!” commented the caustic colonel.

But the reporter from “Town Gossip” smiled and did not reply; and the three disappeared into the reception-room.  The young gentleman, very politely, half pushed, half followed the stout woman out of the reception-room’s range of vision.

“Just leaving, I suppose,” he remarked with pleasant matter-of-factness.

“Yes, sir.  My bags are down at the basement door.  When I heard the ring, I just happened—­”

“I understand.  You wouldn’t have answered the door, if almost all the regular servants had not been gone.  Now, I’d say,” smiling engagingly, “that you might be the cook, and a mighty good cook, too.”

He had such an “air,” did this young man,—­the human air of the real gentleman,—­that, despite the unexpectedness of his overture, the stout woman, instead of taking offense, flushed with pleasure.

“I ought to be a good one, sir; that’s what I’m paid for.”

“Seventy-five a month?” estimated the young gentleman.

“Eighty,” corrected the cook.

“That’s mighty good—­twenty dollars a week.  But, Mrs. Cook,”—­again with his open, engaging smile,—­“pardon me for not knowing your proper name,—­could I induce you to enter my employment—­at, say, twenty dollars a minute?”