Why? Because I don't know when I have met a man whom I liked so much at first sight as I did Williston. He suited me from the ground up. I never spent a more interesting afternoon with any one. No matter what he did, he interested me--I enjoyed watching him handle his cigar as well as I did hearing him tell about his Amazon adventures. Says I to myself: "Here is a man whose friendship I will win if I have to live in New York all my life to get it." And then you had to go and spoil it all. Oh, yes, I know it's just my backwoods way of looking at things. I'm not saying what I do as a boast. I'm making a confession of it. I know why Williston doesn't work. It's because he owns a piano box full of bonds left by his late lamented pa, and when he was educated, the word "work" was crossed out of his spelling-book in red ink. And I'm not saying that he isn't a fine fellow. He's intelligent and witty and companionable and forty other desirable things. But he won't work. Somehow that sticks in my vision of him. It reminds me of the case of Mamie Gastit, who was the prettiest, best-dispositioned, and most capable girl in Homeburg, but who had a glass eye. We didn't hold it up against her, but it made us awfully sad. There were plenty of Homeburg girls who would have been decorated by a glass eye. Why did Providence have to wish it on the finest girl in town? You say it is no crime not to work in New York? Bless you, I know it. In fact, loafing in New York is the most fascinating business in the world. Why, it seems as if you New York men actually struggle to get spare time. I've sat in your office and watched you on Saturday morning working yourself into a blue haze in your efforts to get done early enough to cord up a fine big mess of leisure on Saturday afternoon. That's the difference between New York and Homeburg. In Homeburg you would have been stretching out your job to last until supper time--unless you were one of our nineteen golfers, or the roads were good enough to let you drive over to the baseball game at Paynesville. Leisure in New York means pleasure, excitement, and seven dozen kinds of interest. But for many and many a long year in hundreds of Homeburg homes, leisure has meant waiting for meal times--and not much of anything else.