The very first of them to come was Charles Gardiner West, stopping on his way to the office, troubled, concerned, truly sympathetic, to express, in a beautiful and perfect way, his lasting interest in his one-time assistant.  Not far behind him had come Mr. Hickok, the director who looked like James E. Winter, who had often chatted with the assistant editor in times gone by, and who spoke confidently of the day when he would come back to the Post.  Beverley Byrd had come, too, manly and friendly; Plonny Neal, ill at ease for once in his life; Evan Montague, of the Post, had asked to be allowed to make the arrangements for the funeral; Buck Klinker had actually made those arrangements.  Better than most of these, perhaps, were the young men of the Mercury, raw, embarrassed, genuine young men, who, stopping him on the street, did not seem to know why they stopped him, who, lacking West’s verbal felicity, could do nothing but take his hand, hot with the fear that they might be betrayed into expressing any feeling, and stammer out:  “Doc, if you want anything—­why dammit, Doc—­you call on me, hear?”

Best of all had been Buck Klinker—­Buck, who had made him physically, who had dragged him into contact with life over his own protests, who had given him the first editorial he ever wrote that was worth reading—­Buck, the first real friend he had ever had.  It was to Buck that he had telephoned an hour after his father’s death, for he needed help of a practical sort at once, and his one-time trainer was the man of all men to give it to him.  Buck had come, constrained and silent; he was obviously awed by the Doc’s sudden emergence into stunning notoriety.  To be Surface’s son was, to him, like being the son of Iscariot and Lucrezia Borgia.  On the other hand, he was aware that, of Klinkers and Queeds, a Surface might proudly say:  “There are no such people.”  So he had greeted his friend stiffly as Mr. Surface, and was amazed at the agitation with which that usually impassive young man had put a hand upon his shoulder and said:  “I’m the same Doc always to you, Buck, only now I’m Doc Surface instead of Doc Queed.”  After that everything had been all right.  Buck had answered very much after the fashion of the young men of the Mercury, and then rushed off to arrange for the interment, and also to find for Doc Surface lodgings somewhere which heavily undercut Mrs. Paynter’s modest prices.

The sudden discovery that he was not alone in the world, that he had friends in it, real friends who believed in him and whom nothing could ever take away, shook the young man to the depths of his being.  Was not this compensation for everything?  Never had he imagined that people could be so kind; never had he dreamed that people’s kindness could mean so much to him.  In the light of this new knowledge, it seemed to him that the last scales fell from his eyes ...  Were not these friendships, after all, the best work of a man’s life?  Did he place a higher value even on his book itself, which, it seemed, he might never finish now?