The nature of Selden’s calling was such that he was not accustomed to being received with a hint of enthusiastic welcome.  There was something almost akin to this in the vicar’s courteously amiable, aquiline countenance when he rose to shake hands with the young man on his entrance.  Mr. Penzance was indeed slightly disappointed that his greeting was not responded to by some characteristic phrasing.  His American was that of Sam Slick and Artemus Ward, Punch and various English witticisms in anecdote.  Life at the vicarage of Dunstan had not revealed to him that the model had become archaic.

The revelation dawned upon him during his intercourse with G. Selden.  The young man in his cheap bicycling suit was a new development.  He was markedly unlike an English youth of his class, as he was neither shy, nor laboriously at his ease.  That he was at his ease to quite an amazing degree might perhaps have been remotely resented by the insular mind, accustomed to another order of bearing in its social inferiors, had it not been so obviously founded on entire unconsciousness of self, and so mingled with open appreciation of the unanticipated pleasures of the occasion.  Nothing could have been farther from G. Selden than any desire to attempt to convey the impression that he had enjoyed the hospitality of persons of rank on previous occasions.  He found indeed a gleeful point in the joke of the incongruousness of his own presence amid such surroundings.

“What Little Willie was expecting,” he remarked once, to the keen joy of Mr. Penzance, “was a hunk of bread and cheese at a village saloon somewhere.  I ought to have said ‘pub,’ oughtn’t I?  You don’t call them saloons here.”

He was encouraged to talk, and in his care-free fluency he opened up many vistas to the interested Mr. Penzance, who found himself, so to speak, whirled along Broadway, rushed up the steps of the elevated railroad and struggling to obtain a seat, or a strap to hang to on a Sixth Avenue train.  The man was saturated with the atmosphere of the hot battle he lived in.  From his childhood he had known nothing but the fever heat of his “little old New York,” as he called it with affectionate slanginess, and any temperature lower than that he was accustomed to would have struck him as being below normal.  Penzance was impressed by his feeling of affection for the amazing city of his birth.  He admired, he adored it, he boasted joyously of its perfervid charm.

“Something doing,” he said.  “That’s what my sort of a fellow likes—­something doing.  You feel it right there when you walk along the streets.  Little old New York for mine.  It’s good enough for Little Willie.  And it never stops.  Why, Broadway at night——­”