No, maybe not."

There was a pause. It was Flint who resumed. "I rather like to think
of that interior decorator littering up his dining-room every
night--clamps and glue-pots on the sideboard--hardly room for the
sugar-bowl--lumber underneath--and then bringing out a new boat in
the spring."

Wurm looked up from the couch. "Stevenson," he said, "should have
known that fellow. He would have found him a place among his Lantern
Bearers."

Flint continued. "From the pond I walked down Fifth Avenue."

"It's Fifth Avenue," said Flannel Shirt, "everything up above
Fifty-ninth Street--and what it stands for, that I want to get away
from."

"Easy, Flannel Shirt," said Flint. "Fifth Avenue doesn't interest me
much either. It's too lonely. Everybody is always away. The big stone
buildings aren't homes: they are points of departure, as somebody
called them. And they were built for kings and persons of spacious
lives, but they have been sublet to smaller folk. Or does no one live
inside? You never see a curtain stir. There is never a face at a
window. Everything is stone and dead. One might think that a Gorgon
had gone riding on a 'bus top, and had thrown his cold eye upon the
house fronts." Flint paused. "How can one live obscurely, as these
folk do, in the twilight, in so beautiful a shell? Even a crustacean
sometimes shows his nose at his door. And yet what a wonderful street
it would be if persons really lived there, and looked out of their
windows, and sometimes, on clear days, hung their tapestries and rugs
across the outer walls. Actually," added Flint, "I prefer to walk on
the East Side. It is gayer."

"There is poverty, of course," he went on after a moment, "and
suffering. But the streets are not depressing. They have fun on the
East Side. There are so many children and there is no loneliness. If
the street is blessed with a standpipe, it seems designed as a post
for leaping. Any vacant wall--if the street is so lucky--serves for a
game. There is baseball on the smooth pavement, or if one has a piece
of chalk, he can lay out a kind of hopscotch--not stretched out, for
there isn't room, but rolled up like a jelly cake. One must hop to the
middle and out again. Or perhaps one is an artist and with a crayon he
spends his grudge upon an enemy--these drawings can be no likeness of
a friend. Or love guides the chalky fingers. And all the time
slim-legged girls sit on curb and step and act as nursemaids to the
younger f