“When a chap gets sorry for himself,” he remarked once, “he’s down and out.  That’s a stone-cold fact.  There’s lots of hard-luck stories that you’ve got to hear anyhow.  The fellow that can keep his to himself is the fellow that’s likely to get there.”

“Get there?” the vicar murmured reflectively, and Selden chuckled again.

“Get where he started out to go to—­the White House, if you like.  The fellows that have got there kept their hardluck stories quiet, I bet.  Guess most of ’em had plenty during election, if they were the kind to lie awake sobbing on their pillows because their feelings were hurt.”

He had never been sorry for himself, it was evident, though it must be admitted that there were moments when the elderly English clergyman, whose most serious encounters had been annoying interviews with cottagers of disrespectful manner, rather shuddered as he heard his simple recital of days when he had tramped street after street, carrying his catalogue with him, and trying to tell his story of the Delkoff to frantically busy men who were driven mad by the importunate sight of him, to worried, ill-tempered ones who broke into fury when they heard his voice, and to savage brutes who were only restrained by law from kicking him into the street.

“You’ve got to take it, if you don’t want to lose your job.  Some of them’s as tired as you are.  Sometimes, if you can give ’em a jolly and make ’em laugh, they’ll listen, and you may unload a machine.  But it’s no merry jest just at first—­particularly in bad weather.  The first five weeks I was with the Delkoff I never made a sale.  Had to live on my ten per, and that’s pretty hard in New York.  Three and a half for your hall bedroom, and the rest for your hash and shoes.  But I held on, and gradually luck began to turn, and I began not to care so much when a man gave it to me hot.”

The vicar of Mount Dunstan had never heard of the “hall bedroom” as an institution.  A dozen unconscious sentences placed it before his mental vision.  He thought it horribly touching.  A narrow room at the back of a cheap lodging house, a bed, a strip of carpet, a washstand—­this the sole refuge of a male human creature, in the flood tide of youth, no more than this to come back to nightly, footsore and resentful of soul, after a day’s tramp spent in forcing himself and his wares on people who did not want him or them, and who found infinite variety in the forcefulness of their method of saying so.

“What you know, when you go into a place, is that nobody wants to see you, and no one will let you talk if they can help it.  The only thing is to get in and rattle off your stunt before you can be fired out.”