“Just ran down for a few days,” said he, “to sign some papers and stuff like that.  My lawyer wired me to come.  Well, you indolent cockney, what are you doing in town?  I took a chance and telephoned, and they said you were here.  What’s the matter with that Utopia on Long Island where you used to take your typewriter and your villainous temper every summer?  Anything wrong with the—­er—­swans, weren’t they, that used to sing on the farms at night?”

“Ducks,” said I.  “The songs of swans are for luckier ears.  They swim and curve their necks in artificial lakes on the estates of the wealthy to delight the eyes of the favorites of Fortune.”

“Also in Central Park,” said North, “to delight the eyes of immigrants and bummers.  I’ve seen em there lots of times.  But why are you in the city so late in the summer?”

“New York City,” I began to recite, “is the finest sum—­”

“No, you don’t,” said North, emphatically.  “You don’t spring that old one on me.  I know you know better.  Man, you ought to have gone up with us this summer.  The Prestons are there, and Tom Volney and the Monroes and Lulu Stanford and the Miss Kennedy and her aunt that you liked so well.”

“I never liked Miss Kennedy’s aunt,” I said.

“I didn’t say you did,” said North.  “We are having the greatest time we’ve ever had.  The pickerel and trout are so ravenous that I believe they would swallow your hook with a Montana copper-mine prospectus fastened on it.  And we’ve a couple of electric launches; and I’ll tell you what we do every night or two—­we tow a rowboat behind each one with a big phonograph and a boy to change the discs in ’em.  On the water, and twenty yards behind you, they are not so bad.  And there are passably good roads through the woods where we go motoring.  I shipped two cars up there.  And the Pinecliff Inn is only three miles away.  You know the Pinecliff.  Some good people are there this season, and we run over to the dances twice a week.  Can’t you go back with me for a week, old man?”

I laughed.  “Northy,” said I—­“if I may be so familiar with a millionaire, because I hate both the names Spencer and Grenville—­your invitation is meant kindly, but—­the city in the summer-time for me.  Here, while the bourgeoisie is away, I can live as Nero lived—­ barring, thank heaven, the fiddling—­while the city burns at ninety in the shade.  The tropics and the zones wait upon me like handmaidens.  I sit under Florida palms and eat pomegranates while Boreas himself, electrically conjured up, blows upon me his Arctic breath.  As for trout, you know, yourself, that Jean, at Maurice’s, cooks them better than any one else in the world.”

“Be advised,” said North.  “My chef has pinched the blue ribbon from the lot.  He lays some slices of bacon inside the trout, wraps it all in corn-husks—­the husks of green corn, you know—­buries them in hot ashes and covers them with live coals.  We build fires on the bank of the lake and have fish suppers.”