Life bestirred itself in the bright sunlight in the streets. First there was a surface life and then another and more subtle life going on below the surface and the football-story writer felt both very keenly--he was one made to feel all life keenly--but all the time he kept trying to think only of the outside of things. That would be better for him, he thought. A story writer who had written football stories for ten or fifteen years might very well get himself into a bad way by letting his fancy play too much over the life immediately about him. It was just possible--well you see it might turn out that he would come in the end to hate a football game more than anything else in the world--he might come to hate a football game as that furtive fellow I had seen in the restaurant that afternoon no doubt hated a prison. There were his wife and child and his automobile to be thought about. He did not drive the automobile much himself--in fact driving it made him nervous--but his wife and the daughter from Vassar loved driving it. And so there he was in the town--on the main street of the town. It was, let us say, a bright early Fall morning and the sun was shining and the air filled with the tang of the sea. Why did he find it so difficult to speak with anyone regarding the half-formed thoughts and feelings inside himself? He had always found it difficult to speak of such things, he explained, and that was the reason he had come to see me. I was a fellow writer and no doubt I also was often caught in the same trap. “I thought I would speak to you about it. I thought maybe you and I could talk it over,” he said. He went, on such a morning as I have described, into the town’s main street and for a time stood about before the postoffice. Then he went to stand before the door of a cigar store. A favorite trick of his was to get his shoes shined. “You see,” he exclaimed, eagerly leaning forward on the bed and fingering my Balzac, “you see there is a small fish stand right near the shoe-shining stand and across the street there is a grocery where they set baskets of fruit out on the sidewalk. There are baskets of apples, baskets of peaches, baskets of pears, a bunch of yellow bananas hanging up. The fellow who runs the grocery is a Greek and the man who shines my shoes is an Italian. Lord, he’s a Wop like myself. “As for the man who sells fish, he’s a Yank. “How nice the fish look in the morning sun!” The story-teller’s hand caressed the back of my book and there was something sensual in the touch of his fingers as he tried to describe something to me, a sense he had got of an inner life growing up between the men of such oddly assorted nationalities selling their merchandise on the streets of a New England town.