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“‘It’s this way!’–its builder and skipper laid down his pipe–‘There are about thirty of us boys who are dippy about boats. We can’t afford real boats, so we make these little ones. Daytimes I am an interior decorator. This is a thirty-six. Next winter–if my wife will stand the muss (My God! How it litters up the dining-room!) I am going to build a forty-two. All of the boys bring out a new boat each spring!’ The old fellow squinted at his mast and tightened a cord. Then he continued. ‘If you are interested, come around any Sunday morning until the pond is frozen. And if you want to try your hand at a boat this winter, just ask any of us boys and we will help you. Your first boat or two will be sad–Ju-das! But you will learn.'”

Flint was interrupted by Quill. “Isn’t that rather a silly occupation for grown men?”

“It’s not an occupation,” said Flint. “It’s an avocation, and it isn’t silly. Any one of us would enjoy it, if he weren’t so self-conscious. And it’s more picturesque than golf and takes more skill. And what courtesy! These men form what is really a club–a club in its primitive and true sense. And I was invited to be one of them.”

Flannel Shirt broke in. “By George, that was courtesy. If you had happened on a polo player at his club–a man not known to you–he wouldn’t have invited you to come around and bring your pony for instruction.”

“It’s not an exact comparison, is it, Old Flannel Shirt?”

“No, maybe not.”

There was a pause. It was Flint who resumed. “I rather like to think of that interior decorator littering up his dining-room every night–clamps and glue-pots on the sideboard–hardly room for the sugar-bowl–lumber underneath–and then bringing out a new boat in the spring.”

Wurm looked up from the couch. “Stevenson,” he said, “should have known that fellow. He would have found him a place among his Lantern Bearers.”

Flint continued. “From the pond I walked down Fifth Avenue.”

“It’s Fifth Avenue,” said Flannel Shirt, “everything up above Fifty-ninth Street–and what it stands for, that I want to get away from.”

“Easy, Flannel Shirt,” said Flint. “Fifth Avenue doesn’t interest me much either. It’s too lonely. Everybody is always away. The big stone buildings aren’t homes: they are points of departure, as somebody called them. And they were built for kings and persons of spacious lives, but they have been sublet to smaller folk. Or does no one live inside? You never see a curtain stir. There is never a face at a window. Everything is stone and dead. One might think that a Gorgon had gone riding on a ‘bus top, and had thrown his cold eye upon the house fronts.” Flint paused. “How can one live obscurely, as these folk do, in the twilight, in so beautiful a shell? Even a crustacean sometimes shows his nose at his door. And yet what a wonderful street it would be if persons really lived there, and looked out of their windows, and sometimes, on clear days, hung their tapestries and rugs across the outer walls. Actually,” added Flint, “I prefer to walk on the East Side. It is gayer.”

“There is poverty, of course,” he went on after a moment, “and suffering. But the streets are not depressing. They have fun on the East Side. There are so many children and there is no loneliness. If the street is blessed with a standpipe, it seems designed as a post for leaping. Any vacant wall–if the street is so lucky–serves for a game. There is baseball on the smooth pavement, or if one has a piece of chalk, he can lay out a kind of hopscotch–not stretched out, for there isn’t room, but rolled up like a jelly cake. One must hop to the middle and out again. Or perhaps one is an artist and with a crayon he spends his grudge upon an enemy–these drawings can be no likeness of a friend. Or love guides the chalky fingers. And all the time slim-legged girls sit on curb and step and act as nursemaids to the younger fry.”