“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 there 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.

“Where can you find air any fresher or purer than this?” I asked, as we sped into Central’s boskiest dell.

“Air!” said North, contemptuously.  “Do you call this air?—­this muggy vapor, smelling of garbage and gasoline smoke.  Man, I wish you could get one sniff of the real Adirondack article in the pine woods at daylight.”

“I have heard of it,” said I.  “But for fragrance and tang and a joy in the nostrils I would not give one puff of sea breeze across the bay, down on my little boat dock on Long Island, for ten of your turpentine-scented tornadoes.”

“Then why,” asked North, a little curiously, “don’t you go there instead of staying cooped up in this Greater Bakery?”

“Because,” said I, doggedly, “I have discovered that New York is the greatest summer—­”

“Don’t say that again,” interrupted North, “unless you’ve actually got a job as General Passenger Agent of the Subway.  You can’t really believe it.”

I went to some trouble to try to prove my theory to my friend.  The Weather Bureau and the season had conspired to make the argument worthy of an able advocate.