You
couldn't have slapped him on the back even if you had felt the impulse;
he wasn't the to-be-slapped kind. And of course that means that he
wouldn't have slapped any of us, either. And he was the type you
couldn't call by his first name.
Looking back, I sometimes think of all that he missed in the way of
good-fellowship; for we were the most decent staff in New York, as
honest and generous and warmly human a bunch as anyone could hope to
find. We were ambitious, too, mostly college men, and we had that
passion for good writing, perhaps not in ourselves, but in others, which
is so often the newspaper man's special endowment. We were swift to
recognize a fine passage in one another's copy; and praise from old
Hanscher meant a royal little dinner at Engel's with mugs of cream ale,
and an hour's difference in our arrival at the office next day. Oh,
happy, vanished times! Magic moments that peeped through the grayness of
hard work, and made the whole game so worth while.
Well, Stanton won out. He told us about it afterwards.
On the pretext that he wanted to ask Shelby's advice about some
important personal matter, he urged him to let him give him as good a
meal as Mouqin could provide, with a certain vintage of French wine
which he knew Shelby was fond of.
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