To take me by the hand,
But I'll not desert this one
Just because I'm rich and grand."

Enlightened at last, Ewing joined in the applause, amid which Chalmers
resumed his seat. Instantly perceiving why they had laughed at his own
song, he burned at recalling how chance alone had saved him from
betraying a simple-hearted faith in the virtues of that gem. Now it was
funny, even to him. Other songs of Ben's rang in his ears; they were
_all_ funny--though he must never let Ben know that. He had unwittingly
betrayed Ben to a ribald crew, but he had learned a thing it was well to
know. He had learned of the world; he had aged in a leap.

They sat late at table, drinking beer from stone mugs, smoking
long-stemmed pipes and trifling with song. They blended their voices in
melting harmony at the climax of "Nelly's" woe and in the acuter parts
of "Nothing but Mother."

As they drifted out at midnight Chalmers made an appointment with Ewing
to inspect the vacant studio and make himself, if he liked, one of the
colony of not too serious workers housed by the Rookery.

Half a dozen men strolled with him to the Stuyvesant, and in the shadow
of its sober doors, as a parting testimonial to his worth, they sang
once more in blended pathos:

"She was my moth-e-r-r once
In days so long a-g-o-o-o!"

He watched them up the street a block, pouring out their hearts in song
to a watchful and cynical policeman.

CHAPTER XII

THE NEW MEMBER

When Ewing, a few days later, moved into the vacant studio on the top
floor of the Rookery, the men there made an affair of it, flocking from
their studios to receive him. They showed him the view from his windows,
a far stretch of dull-red roofs, with murky water butts stuck aloft like
giant cockades against the gray sky. They showed him where he would
sleep, in a little closet-like alcove screened from the big room by a
gay curtain. They exhibited the alcohol lamp left by Glynn, over which
water would be boiled for the morning coffee. And they superintended,
from their wider experience, the arrangement of his belongings.

He felt aloof from the friendly turmoil, unable to believe that the
place would be his own. The thing was too vast for his experience. It
would surely be for another that Baldwin spread the Navajo blankets on
the floor and couch; for some one else that Chalmers, of the beard--him
they called the Brushwood Boy or eke "the human ambush"--remove