itself expeditiously into touch with the best thought of the age.

Too busily occupied with practical realities to follow the thought of
the age through all its divagations and into all its recesses, these
Massachusetts business men had had to consider methods of access more
quintessential and nuclear. And they had decided not to hunt out the
best thought in its merely germinating stages, but to wait until it had
emerged and flowered to some trustworthy recognition, and then, rather
than toil through recondite and possibly already reconsidered books and
writings generally, to offer an impressive fee to the emerged new
thinker, and to invite him to come to them and to lecture to them and to
have a conference with them, and to tell them simply, competently and
completely at first hand just all that he was about. To come, in fact,
and be himself--in a highly concentrated form. In this way a number of
interesting Europeans had been given very pleasant excursions to
America, and the society had been able to form very definite opinions
upon their teaching. And Mr. Britling was one of the representative
thinkers upon which this society had decided to inform itself. It was to
broach this invitation and to offer him the impressive honorarium by
which the society honoured not only its guests but itself, that Mr.
Direck had now come to Matching's Easy. He had already sent Mr. Britling
a letter of introduction, not indeed intimating his precise purpose, but
mentioning merely a desire to know him, and the letter had been so
happily phrased and its writer had left such a memory of pleasant
hospitality on Mr. Britling's mind during Mr. Britling's former visit to
New York, that it had immediately produced for Mr. Direck an invitation
not merely to come and see him but to come and stay over the week-end.

And here they were shaking hands.