“New York!” reiterated Conover. “I’ve took some slight pains to learn a few things about that place these last couple of months. Before that I took your word for it that it was a hectic, electric-lit whirlpool where nothing ever was quiet or sane, and where a young cub who could get arrested for smashing up a hotel lobby was looked up to as a pillar of gilded society. Since then I’ve bothered to find out on my own account. New York’s a city with about two millions of people living on Manhattan Island alone. We out-of-town jays are told these two millions are a gay, abandoned, fashionable lot that spend their days in the congenial stunt of piling up fortunes and their nights in every sort of high jinks that can cost money and keep ’em up till dawn. ‘All-night fun, all-day fortune-grabbing. Great place! Come see it!’ Well, I _have_ seen it. Along around five or six P.M. about ninety-eight per cent. of those two million people stop work. They’ve been fortune-grabbing all right, since early morning. Only, they’ve been grabbing it usually for some one else. They pile onto the subway or the elevated or the big bridge and—and where do they go? To a merry old all-night revel on the Great White Way? To an orgy of ‘On-with-the-dance, let-joy-be-unrefined,’ hey? Not them. It’s home they go, quiet and without exhibiting to the neighbors any season passes for all-night dissipation. They are as respectable, decent, orderly, early-to-bed a crowd as if they lived on a farm. ’Tain’t their fault if ‘home’s’ usually built on the folding-bed plan and more condensed than a can of patent milk. Apart from that, they live just as everybody else in this country lives—no better, no worse, no gayer, no quieter. There’s not a penny’s difference between that decent ninety-eight per cent. and the business and working folks right here in Granite.” Gerald did not answer. He had not heard. “That’s the ‘typical New Yorker,’” went on Caleb. “The ‘typical New Yorker’—ninety-eight per cent. of him—is the typical every-day man or woman of any city. He does his work, supports his family, and goes to bed before eleven. Those are the folks I guess _you_ didn’t see much of when you was there. Nor of the _real_ society push or even the climbers. The society headliners are too few anyhow to count in the general percentage. Besides, they’re out of town half the year. _You_ was mostly engaged in playing ‘Easy Mark’ for the other two per cent. The crowd you went with is the sort that calls themselves ‘typical New Yorkers,’ and stays out all-night ’cause they haven’t the brains to find any other place to go. Just a dirty little fringe of humanity, hanging about all-night restaurants or drinking adulterated booze in some thirst emporium, or spending some one else’s money in a green-table joint. They yawn and look sick of life, and they tell everyone who’ll listen that they’re ‘typical New Yorkers.’