With a curious eye, a critical mind and a fairly withheld judgment Blinker considered the temples, pagodas and kiosks of popularized delights.  Hoi polloi trampled, hustled and crowded him.  Basket parties bumped him; sticky children tumbled, howling, under his feet, candying his clothes.  Insolent youths strolling among the booths with hard-won canes under one arm and easily won girls on the other, blew defiant smoke from cheap cigars into his face.  The publicity gentlemen with megaphones, each before his own stupendous attraction, roared like Niagara in his ears.  Music of all kinds that could be tortured from brass, reed, hide or string, fought in the air to grain space for its vibrations against its competitors.  But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures, The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his caste, repelled him strongly.

In the midst of his disgust he turned and looked down at Florence by his side.  She was ready with her quick smile and upturned, happy eyes, as bright and clear as the water in trout pools.  The eyes were saying that they had the right to be shining and happy, for was their owner not with her (for the present) Man, her Gentleman Friend and holder of the keys to the enchanted city of fun?

Blinker did not read her look accurately, but by some miracle he suddenly saw Coney aright.

He no longer saw a mass of vulgarians seeking gross joys.  He now looked clearly upon a hundred thousand true idealists.  Their offenses were wiped out.  Counterfeit and false though the garish joys of these spangled temples were, he perceived that deep under the gilt surface they offered saving and apposite balm and satisfaction to the restless human heart.  Here, at least, was the husk of Romance, the empty but shining casque of Chivalry, the breath-catching though safe-guarded dip and flight of Adventure, the magic carpet that transports you to the realms of fairyland, though its journey be through but a few poor yards of space.  He no longer saw a rabble, but his brothers seeking the ideal.  There was no magic of poesy here or of art; but the glamour of their imagination turned yellow calico into cloth of gold and the megaphones into the silver trumpets of joy’s heralds.

Almost humbled, Blinker rolled up the shirt sleeves of his mind and joined the idealists.

“You are the lady doctor,” he said to Florence.  “How shall we go about doing this jolly conglomeration of fairy tales, incorporated?”

“We will begin there,” said the Princess, pointing to a fun pagoda on the edge of the sea, “and we will take them all in, one by one.”

They caught the eight o’clock returning boat and sat, filled with pleasant fatigue, against the rail in the bow, listening to the Italians’ fiddle and harp.  Blinker had thrown off all care.  The North Woods seemed to him an uninhabitable wilderness.  What a fuss he had made over signing his name—­pooh! he could sign it a hundred times.  And her name was as pretty as she was—­“Florence,” he said it to himself a great many times.