Yes, to a certain extent that is true—­true of a portion of the Village, at any rate, and a certain percentage of the Villagers.  But even if it is true, it is the sort of truth that needs only a bit of understanding to make us tender and tolerant instead of scornful and hard.  My dear lady, you who complained of the “play-acting,” and you other who, agreeing with her, see in the whimsies and pretenses in Our Village only a spectacle of cheap affectation and artifice, have you lived so long and yet do not know that the play-acting instinct is one of the most universal of all instincts—­the very first developed, and the very last, I truly believe, to die in our faded bodies?  From the moment when we try to play ball with sunbeams through those intermediate years wherein we imagine ourselves everything on earth that we are not, down to those last days of all, when we live, all furtive and unsuspected, a secret life of the spirit—­either a life of remembrance or a life of imagination visualising what we have wanted and have missed,—­what do we do but pretend,—­make believe,—­pose, if you will?  When we are little we pretend to be knights and ladies, pirates and fairy princesses, soldiers and Red Cross nurses, and sailors and hunters and explorers.  We people the window boxes with elves and pixies and the dark corners with Red Indians and bears.  The commonplace world about us is not truly commonplace, since our fancy, still fresh from eternity, can transform three dusty shrubs into an enchanted forest, and an automobile into the most deliciously formidable of the Dragon Family.  A bit later, our pretending is done more cautiously.  We do not confess our shy flights of imagination:  we take a prosaic outward pose, and try not to advertise the fact that our geese wear (to our eyes) swans’ plumage, and that our individual roles are (to our own view) always those of heroes and heroines.  No one of us but mentally sees himself or herself doing something which is as impracticable as cloud-riding.  No one of us but dreams of the impossible and in a shamefaced, almost clandestine, fashion pictures it and lingers over it.  All make-believe, you see, only we hate to admit it!  The different thing about Greenwich is that there they do admit it, quite a number of them.  They accept the pretending, play-acting spirit as a perfectly natural—­no, as an inevitable—­part of life, and, with a certain whimsical seriousness, not unlike that of real children, they provide for it.  You know children can make believe, know that it is make believe, yet enjoy it all the more for that.  So can the Villagers.  Hence, places like—­let us say, as an example—­“The Pirate’s Den.”

It is a very real pirate’s den, lighted only by candles.  A coffin casts a shadow, and there is a regulation “Jolly Roger,” a black flag ornamented with skull and crossbones.  Grim?  Surely, but even a healthy-minded child will play at gruesome and ghoulish games once in a while.