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“I never liked Miss Kennedy’s aunt,” I said.

“I didn’t say you did,” said North. “We are having the greatest time we’ve ever had. The pickerel and trout are so ravenous that I believe they would swallow your hook with a Montana copper-mine prospectus fastened on it. And we’ve a couple of electric launches; and I’ll tell you what we do every night or two–we tow a rowboat behind each one with a big phonograph and a boy to change the discs in ’em. On the water, and twenty yards behind you, they are not so bad. And there are passably good roads through the woods where we go motoring. I shipped two cars up there. And the Pinecliff Inn is only three miles away. You know the Pinecliff. Some good people are there this season, and we run over to the dances twice a week. Can’t you go back with me for a week, old man?”

I laughed. “Northy,” said I–“if I may be so familiar with a millionaire, because I hate both the names Spencer and Grenville–your invitation is meant kindly, but–the city in the summer-time for me. Here, while the bourgeoisie is away, I can live as Nero lived-barring, thank heaven, the fiddling-while the city burns at ninety in the shade. The tropics and the zones wait upon me like handmaidens. I sit under Florida palms and eat pomegranates while Boreas himself, electrically conjured up, blows upon me his Arctic breath. As for trout, you know, yourself, that Jean, at Maurice’s, cooks them better than any one else in the world.”

“Be advised,” said North. “My chef has pinched the blue ribbon from the lot. He lays some slices of bacon inside the trout, wraps it all in corn-husks–the husks of green corn, you know–buries them in hot ashes and covers them with live coals. We build fires on the bank of the lake and have fish suppers.”

“I know,” said I. “And the servants bring down tables and chairs and damask cloths, and you eat with silver forks. I know the kind of camps that you millionaires have. And therc are champagne pails set about, disgracing the wild flowers, and, no doubt, Madame Tetrazzini to sing in the boat pavilion after the trout.”

“Oh no,” said North, concernedly, “we were never as bad as that. We did have a variety troupe up from the city three or four nights, but they weren’t stars by as far as light can travel in the same length of time. I always like a few home comforts even when I’m roughing it. But don’t tell me you prefer to stay in the city during summer. I don’t believe it. If you do, why did you spend your summers there for the last four years, even sneaking away from town on a night train, and refusing to tell your friends where this Arcadian village was?”

“Because,” said I, “they might have followed me and discovered it. But since then I have learned that Amaryllis has come to town. The coolest things, the freshest, the brightest, the choicest, are to be found in the city. If you’ve nothing on hand this evening I will show you.”

“I’m free,” said North, “and I have my light car outside. I suppose, since you’ve been converted to the town, that your idea of rural sport is to have a little whirl between bicycle cops in Central Park and then a mug of sticky ale in some stuffy rathskeller under a fan that can’t stir up as many revolutions in a week as Nicaragua can in a day.”

“We’ll begin with the spin through the Park, anyhow,” I said. I was choking with the hot, stale air of my little apartment, and I wanted that breath of the cool to brace me for the task of proving to my friend that New York was the greatest–and so forth.