The Make-Believe Man | Page 4

happened to me, really have happened. Now, isn't that
so?"
To find the answer that would not hurt his feelings I hesitated, but he
did not wait for my answer. He seldom does.
"Well," on this trip," he went on, "you will see Kinney on the job. You
won't have to take my word for it. You will see adventures walk up and
eat out of my hand."
Our vacation came on the first of September, but we began to plan for it
in April, and up to the night before we left New York we never ceased
planning. Our difficulty was that having been brought up at Fairport,
which is on the Sound, north of New London, I was homesick for a
smell of salt marshes and for the sight of water and ships. Though they
were only schooners carrying cement, I wanted to sit in the sun on the
string-piece of a wharf and watch them. I wanted to beat about the
harbor in a catboat, and feel the tug and pull of the tiller. Kinney
protested that that was no way to spend a vacation or to invite
adventure. His face was set against Fairport. The conversation of
clam-diggers, he said, did not appeal to him; and he complained that at
Fairport our only chance of adventure would be my capsizing the
catboat or robbing a lobster-pot. He insisted we should go to the
mountains, where we would meet what he always calls "our best
people." In September, he explained, everybody goes to the mountains
to recuperate after the enervating atmosphere of the sea-shore. To this I
objected that the little sea air we had inhaled at Mrs. Shaw's basement
dining-room and in the subway need cause us no anxiety. And so, along
these lines, throughout the sleepless, sultry nights of June, July, and
August, we fought it out. There was not a summer resort within five
hundred miles of New York City we did not consider. From the
information bureaus and passenger agents of every railroad leaving
New York, Kinney procured a library of timetables, maps, folders, and
pamphlets, illustrated with the most attractive pictures of summer
hotels, golf links, tennis courts, and boat- houses. For two months he
carried on a correspondence with the proprietors of these hotels; and in

comparing the different prices they asked him for suites of rooms and
sun parlors derived constant satisfaction.
"The Outlook House," he would announce, "wants twenty-four dollars
a day for bedroom, parlor, and private bath. While for the same
accommodations the Carteret Arms asks only twenty. But the Carteret
has no tennis court; and then again, the Outlook has no garage, nor are
dogs allowed in the bedrooms."
As Kinney could not play lawn tennis, and as neither of us owned an
automobile or a dog, or twenty-four dollars, these details to me seemed
superfluous, but there was no health in pointing that out to Kinney.
Because, as he himself says, he has so vivid an imagination that what
he lacks he can "make believe" he has, and the pleasure of possession is
his.
Kinney gives a great deal of thought to his clothes, and the question of
what he should wear on his vacation was upon his mind. When I said I
thought it was nothing to worry about, he snorted indignantly. "YOU
wouldn't!" he said. "If I'D been brought up in a catboat, and had a tan
like a red Indian, and hair like a Broadway blonde, I wouldn't worry
either. Mrs. Shaw says you look exactly like a British peer in disguise."
I had never seen a British peer, with or without his disguise, and I
admit I was interested.
"Why are the girls in this house," demanded Kinney, "always running
to your room to borrow matches? Because they admire your CLOTHES?
If they're crazy about clothes, why don't they come to ME for
matches?"
"You are always out at night," I said.
"You know that's not the answer," he protested. "Why do the type-
writer girls at the office always go to YOU to sharpen their pencils and
tell them how to spell the hard words? Why do the girls in the
lunch-rooms serve you first? Because they're hypnotized by your
clothes? Is THAT it?"
"Do they?" I asked; "I hadn't noticed."
Kinney snorted and tossed up his arms. "He hadn't noticed!" he kept
repeating. "He hadn't noticed!" For his vacation Kinney bought a
second-hand suit-case. It was covered with labels of hotels in France
and Switzerland.
"Joe," I said, "if you carry that bag you will be a walking falsehood."

Kinney's name is Joseph Forbes Kinney; he dropped the Joseph
because he said it did not appear often enough in the Social Register,
and could be found only in the Old Testament, and