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“The Outlook House,” he would announce, “wants twenty-four dollars a day for bedroom, parlor, and private bath. While for the same accommodations the Carteret Arms asks only twenty. But the Carteret has no tennis court; and then again, the Outlook has no garage, nor are dogs allowed in the bedrooms.”

As Kinney could not play lawn tennis, and as neither of us owned an automobile or a dog, or twenty-four dollars, these details to me seemed superfluous, but there was no health in pointing that out to Kinney. Because, as he himself says, he has so vivid an imagination that what he lacks he can “make believe” he has, and the pleasure of possession is his.

Kinney gives a great deal of thought to his clothes, and the question of what he should wear on his vacation was upon his mind. When I said I thought it was nothing to worry about, he snorted indignantly. “YOU wouldn’t!” he said. “If I’D been brought up in a catboat, and had a tan like a red Indian, and hair like a Broadway blonde, I wouldn’t worry either. Mrs. Shaw says you look exactly like a British peer in disguise.” I had never seen a British peer, with or without his disguise, and I admit I was interested.

“Why are the girls in this house,” demanded Kinney, “always running to your room to borrow matches? Because they admire your CLOTHES? If they’re crazy about clothes, why don’t they come to ME for matches?”

“You are always out at night,” I said.

“You know that’s not the answer,” he protested. “Why do the type- writer girls at the office always go to YOU to sharpen their pencils and tell them how to spell the hard words? Why do the girls in the lunch-rooms serve you first? Because they’re hypnotized by your clothes? Is THAT it?”

“Do they?” I asked; “I hadn’t noticed.”

Kinney snorted and tossed up his arms. “He hadn’t noticed!” he kept repeating. “He hadn’t noticed!” For his vacation Kinney bought a second-hand suit-case. It was covered with labels of hotels in France and Switzerland.

“Joe,” I said, “if you carry that bag you will be a walking falsehood.”

Kinney’s name is Joseph Forbes Kinney; he dropped the Joseph because he said it did not appear often enough in the Social Register, and could be found only in the Old Testament, and he has asked me to call him Forbes. Having first known him as “Joe,” I occasionally forget.

“My name is NOT Joe,” he said sternly, “and I have as much right to carry a second-hand bag as a new one. The bag says IT has been to Europe. It does not say that I have been there.”

“But, you probably will,” I pointed out, “and then some one who has really visited those places–“

“Listen!” commanded Kinney. “If you want adventures you must be somebody of importance. No one will go shares in an adventure with Joe Kinney, a twenty-dollar-a-week clerk, the human adding machine, the hall-room boy. But Forbes Kinney, Esq., with a bag from Europe, and a Harvard ribbon round his hat–“

“Is that a Harvard ribbon round your hat?” I asked.

“It is!” declared Kinney; “and I have a Yale ribbon, and a Turf Club ribbon, too. They come on hooks, and you hook ’em on to match your clothes, or the company you keep. And, what’s more,” he continued, with some heat, “I’ve borrowed a tennis racket and a golf bag full of sticks, and you take care you don’t give me away.”

“I see,” I returned, “that you are going to get us into a lot of trouble.”

“I was thinking,” said Kinney, looking at me rather doubtfully, “it might help a lot if for the first week you acted as my secretary, and during the second week I was your secretary.”