And then we drifted, like two trout, out of our cool pool in the great hotel and began to nibble languidly at the gay flies in the swift current of Broadway. And our question of dramatic art was unsettled. We nibbled at the flies, and avoided the hooks, as wise trout do; but soon the weariness of Manhattan in summer overcame us. Nine stories up, facing the south, was Hollis’s apartment, and we soon stepped into an elevator bound for that cooler haven. I was familiar in those quarters, and quickly my play was forgotten, and I stood at a sideboard mixing things, with cracked ice and glasses all about me. A breeze from the bay came in the windows not altogether blighted by the asphalt furnace over which it had passed. Hollis, whistling softly, turned over a late-arrived letter or two on his table, and drew around the coolest wicker armchairs. I was just measuring the Vermouth carefully when I heard a sound. Some man’s voice groaned hoarsely: “False, oh, God!—false, and Love is a lie and friendship but the byword of devils!” I looked around quickly. Hollis lay across the table with his head down upon his outstretched arms. And then he looked up at me and laughed in his ordinary manner. I knew him—he was poking fun at me about my theory. And it did seem so unnatural, those swelling words during our quiet gossip, that I half began to believe I had been mistaken—that my theory was wrong. Hollis raised himself slowly from the table. “You were right about that theatrical business, old man,” he said, quietly, as he tossed a note to me. I read it. Loris had run away with Tom Tolliver. A LITTLE TALK ABOUT MOBS “I see,” remarked the tall gentleman in the frock coat and black slouch hat, “that another street car motorman in your city has narrowly excaped lynching at the hands of an infuriated mob by lighting a cigar and walking a couple of blocks down the street.” “Do you think they would have lynched him?” asked the New Yorker, in the next seat of the ferry station, who was also waiting for the boat. “Not until after the election,” said the tall man, cutting a corner off his plug of tobacco. “I’ve been in your city long enough to know something about your mobs. The motorman’s mob is about the least dangerous of them all, except the National Guard and the Dressmakers’ Convention. “You see, when little Willie Goldstein is sent by his mother for pigs’ knuckles, with a nickel tightly grasped in his chubby fist, he always crosses the street car track safely twenty feet ahead of the car; and then suddenly turns back to ask his mother whether it was pale ale or a spool of 80 white cotton that she wanted. The motorman yells and throws himself on the brakes like a football player. There is a horrible grinding and then a ripping sound, and a piercing shriek, and Willie is sitting, with part of his trousers torn away by the fender, screaming for his lost nickel.