He was thinking of this man because he had read the night before, at the club, a story of his in a magazine. This man was a writer of stories and lived in what was called Greenwich Village; and this particular story was one of romantic adventure in the South Seas. The story-writer’s wife and the banker’s wife had been friends from girlhood, and the story-writer and the banker were acquaintances of a sort. The banker was always a little aware in the other’s presence of his own secret and foolish past. He was embarrassed when he talked of financial conditions by a fear and perhaps also a hope that the other would somehow see through him. Also he kept wondering if a writer imagined all his romantic adventures or if some of them had really happened. He particularly wondered this about the story he had read the night before at the club, for it gave such a vivid description of a South Sea island that it seemed as though it could only have been written by one who had lived there. The story-writer was at home. His wife, he explained, was at the seashore with the children, and he was staying in town to do a story or two to pay their summer bills. He sat down again in his study, cocking up his feet on the typewriter desk and lighting a fresh cigarette. “No, you’re not interrupting me,” he said. “Don’t worry about that. I never get started to work till after midnight, and I want somebody to talk to while this new South Sea yarn ferments in my head. Have a cigarette.” He started to talk. Again the banker had the feeling of guarding a secret. It was nearly midnight when the conversation took a turn that promised to satisfy the banker’s curiosities. “It’s odd,” said the story-writer, and paused. “It’s very odd. I’m supposed to be a respectable citizen. But consider these stories of mine. The hero, who is me, meets a beautiful girl and falls in love with her. Sometimes she is a princess, sometimes a chorus girl; just now she is usually a dusky maiden with flowers in her hair. I suppose I’ve met and made love to more than a hundred girls in the course of my literary career. To be sure, I always ask them to marry me; but I never tell them of all the other beautiful heroines I have loved and left behind me. And yet nobody thinks I’m a scoundrel. Not even my wife!” “Of course not,” said the banker. “That would be absurd.” “Yes, it would be unthinkable,” said the story-writer. “For when I have finished one of my adventures, I mail it to an editor and get a check for it. And that’s exactly why my wife doesn’t object. It pays the rent; and so it’s perfectly all right for me to spend my life in extra-matrimonial love scenes. But why do I get paid for these adventures?” he went on meditatively. “Because people want adventures. When a man reads one of my romantic yarns, _he_ becomes the hero, _he_ makes love to beautiful, strange girls. And yet no one has thought of proposing laws to forbid married men to read love stories.”