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“Old Hundred,” said I, “you are something of an idiot. Those games of ours were nature’s school; nature takes that way to teach us how to behave ourselves socially, how to conquer others, but mostly how to conquer ourselves. We were men-pups, that’s all. For Heaven’s sake, can’t you have a pleasant afternoon thinking of your boyhood without becoming maudlin?”

“You talk like a book by G. Stanley Hall,” retorted Old Hundred. “No doubt our games were nature’s way of teaching us how to be men, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the process of being taught was better than the process of putting the knowledge into practice. I hate these folks who rhapsodize sentimentally over children as ‘potential little men.’ Potential fiddle-sticks! Their charm is because they ain’t men yet, because they are still trailing clouds of glory, because they are nice, mysterious, imaginative, sensitive, nasty little beasts. You! All you are thinking of is that dinner I owe you! Well, come on, then, we’ll go back into that monstrous heap of mortar down there to the south, where there are no children who know how to play, no tops, no marbles, no woods and ponds and bees’ nests in the fences, no Emily Ruggleses; where every building is, as you say, the gravestone of a game, and the only sport left is the playing of the market for keeps!”

He got up painfully. I got up painfully. We both limped. Down the hill in silence we went. On the train Old Hundred lighted a cigar. “What do you say to the club for dinner?” he asked. “I ought to go across to the Bar Association afterward and look up some cases on that rebate suit. By Jove, but it’s going to be a pretty trial!”

“That pleases me all right,” I answered. “I’ve got to meet Ainsley after the theatre and go over our new third act. I think you are going to like it better than the old.”

At the next station Old Hundred went out on the platform and hailed a newsboy. “I want to see how the market closed,” he explained, as he buried himself in his paper.