“It seems a good thing,” said Mount Dunstan.  “If I had much business to transact, I should buy one.”

“If you bought one you’d have business,” responded Selden.  “That’s what’s the matter.  It’s the up-to-date machines that set things humming.  A slow, old-fashioned typewriter uses a firm’s time, and time’s money.”

“I don’t find it so,” said Mount Dunstan.  “I have more time than I can possibly use—­and no money.”

G. Selden looked at him with friendly interest.  His experience, which was varied, had taught him to recognize symptoms.  This nice, rough-looking chap, who, despite his rather shabby clothes, looked like a gentleman, wore an expression Jones’s junior assistant had seen many a time before.  He had seen it frequently on the countenances of other junior assistants who had tramped the streets and met more or less savage rebuffs through a day’s length, without disposing of a single Delkoff, and thereby adding five dollars to the ten per.  It was the kind of thing which wiped the youth out of a man’s face and gave him a hard, worn look about the eyes.  He had looked like that himself many an unfeeling day before he had learned to “know the ropes and not mind a bit of hot air.”  His buoyant, slangy soul was a friendly thing.  He was a gregarious creature, and liked his fellow man.  He felt, indeed, more at ease with him when he needed “jollying along.”  Reticence was not even etiquette in a case as usual as this.

“Say,” he broke out, “perhaps I oughtn’t to have worried you.  Are you up against it?  Down on your luck, I mean,” in hasty translation.

Mount Dunstan grinned a little.

“That’s a very good way of putting it,” he answered.  “I never heard ’up against it’ before.  It’s good.  Yes, I’m up against it.

“Out of a job?” with genial sympathy.

“Well, the job I had was too big for me.  It needed capital.”  He grinned slightly again, recalling a phrase of his Western past.  “I’m afraid I’m down and out.”

“No, you’re not,” with cheerful scorn.  “You’re not dead, are you?  S’long as a man’s not been dead a month, there’s always a chance that there’s luck round the corner.  How did you happen here?  Are you piking it?”

Momentarily Mount Dunstan was baffled.  G. Selden, recognising the fact, enlightened him.  “That’s New York again,” he said, with a boyish touch of apology.  “It means on the tramp.  Travelling along the turnpike.  You don’t look as if you had come to that—­though it’s queer the sort of fellows you do meet piking sometimes.  Theatrical companies that have gone to pieces on the road, you know.  Perhaps—­” with a sudden thought, “you’re an actor.  Are you?”