It was a bit of old Chelsea, nothing less.  Titania clapped her hands, and I lit my pipe in gratification.  Beside us was a row of little houses of warm red brick with peaked mansard roofs and cozy bay windows and polished door knockers.  In front of them was the lumpy little park, cut up into irregular hills, where children were flying kites.  And beyond that, an embankment and the river in a dim wet mist.  There was Blackwell’s Island, and a sailing barge slipping by.  In the distance we could see the colossal span of the new Hell Gate bridge.  With the journalist’s instinct for superlatives I told Titania it was the largest single span in the world.  I wonder if it is?

As to that I know not.  But it was the river that lured us.  On the embankment we found benches and sat down to admire the scene.  It was as picturesque as Battersea in Whistler’s mistiest days.  A ferryboat, crossing to Astoria, hooted musically through the haze.  Tugs, puffing up past Blackwell’s Island into the Harlem River, replied with mellow blasts.  The pungent tang of the East River tickled our nostrils, and all my old ambition to be a tugboat captain returned.

And then trouble began.  Just as I was planning how we might bilk our landlord on Long Island and move all our belongings to this delicious spot, gradually draw our friends around us, and make East End Avenue the Cheyne Walk of New York—­we might even import an English imagist poet to lend cachet to the coterie—­I saw by Titania’s face that something was wrong.

I pressed her for the reason of her frown.

She thought the region was unhealthy.

Now when Titania thinks that a place is unhealthy no further argument is possible.  Just on what data she bases these deductions I have never been able to learn.  I think she can tell by the shape of the houses, or the lush quality of the foliage, or the fact that the garbage men collect from the front instead of from the back.  But however she arrives at the conclusion, it is immutable.

Any place that I think is peculiarly amusing, or quaint, or picturesque, Titania thinks is unhealthy.

Sometimes I can see it coming.  We are on our way to Mulberry Bend, or the Bowery, or Farrish’s Chop House.  I see her brow begin to pucker.  “Do you feel as though it is going to be unhealthy?” I ask anxiously.  If she does, there is nothing for it but to clutch at the nearest subway station and hurry up to Grant’s Tomb.  In that bracing ether her spirits revive.

So it was on this afternoon.  My Utopian vision of a Chelsea in New York, outdoing the grimy salons of Greenwich Village, fell in splinters at the bottom of my mind.  Sadly I looked upon the old Carl Schurz mansion on the hill, and we departed for the airy plateaus of Central Park.  Desperately I pointed to the fading charms of East River Park—­the convent round the corner, the hokey pokey cart by the curbstone.

I shall never be a tugboat captain.  It isn’t healthy.