of a wharf and watch them.  I wanted to beat about the harbor in a catboat, and feel the tug and pull of the tiller.  Kinney protested that that was no way to spend a vacation or to invite adventure.  His face was set against Fairport.  The conversation of clam-diggers, he said, did not appeal to him; and he complained that at Fairport our only chance of adventure would be my capsizing the catboat or robbing a lobster-pot.  He insisted we should go to the mountains, where we would meet what he always calls “our best people.”  In September, he explained, everybody goes to the mountains to recuperate after the enervating atmosphere of the sea-shore.  To this I objected that the little sea air we had inhaled at Mrs. Shaw’s basement dining-room and in the subway need cause us no anxiety.  And so, along these lines, throughout the sleepless, sultry nights of June, July, and August, we fought it out.  There was not a summer resort within five hundred miles of New York City we did not consider.  From the information bureaus and passenger agents of every railroad leaving New York, Kinney procured a library of timetables, maps, folders, and pamphlets, illustrated with the most attractive pictures of summer hotels, golf links, tennis courts, and boat-houses.  For two months he carried on a correspondence with the proprietors of these hotels; and in comparing the different prices they asked him for suites of rooms and sun parlors derived constant satisfaction.

“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.