Then an uncle died, leaving him a legacy of a little more than five thousand dollars. With five thousand dollars a young man could get started in business, and it was high time for him to do so. He went to San Francisco and looked about for an opening. In a café he met a man who had just come back from incredible adventures in the South Seas. To this man’s tales he listened all evening, and then went back to his lodging, where he could not sleep, but walked back and forth for hours in a little garden, dreaming, awake, of strange birds and strange trees and slim, brown, laughing girls with flowers in their hair. Next morning he went down to the waterfront, and looked out thoughtfully in the direction of the South Seas. With his five thousand dollars he could buy or build a little boat and, with some congenial companion, set sail for those islands of incredible adventure. But he knew that this was mere romantic folly, more worthy of a boy than of a man. He must begin to take life seriously. He shook his head and frowned, and went on to the café. Every morning--sometimes it was noon--for a whole year he went down to the waterfront and looked out over the bay. And every afternoon and evening he sat in some café. At the end of the year he had made many friends and heard many curious tales, and his money was all gone. He began to look for a job. He had an extensive convivial acquaintance among the business men of the town; but they did not seem to have any job for him, though they were willing to lend him a few dollars. So he borrowed a little money and came to New York, where no one knew, as he expressed it, what a damn fool he was. He took care that no one should know. He got a job in a Fifth Avenue bank, and when he was barely forty he was one of its vice-presidents. He had an apartment in town and a house in the country and a car and a wife and four lovely children, and he was proud of them all. He was proud of being a sober and responsible citizen--proud of having conquered his romantic propensities. Perhaps his children knew, from the wild, half-true and half-imagined tales he told them at their bedtime hours, that he was still at heart a romantic adventurer. But nobody else, and least of all his sweet and sensible wife, suspected his secret. _II. A Conversation._ In the summer of his fortieth year the town apartment had been closed, and his wife and children were in the country. He himself was going to the country in a day or two, as soon as he had cleared up those matters, whatever they are, that keep bankers in town in August. He stayed at his club until one evening on an impulse he went down to an out-of-the-way little street near Washington Square, in the hope of hearing some talk from a man who lived there, and whom he had been thinking of at intervals all day.