The Blinker wealth was in lands, tenements and hereditaments, as the legal phrase goes. Lawyer Oldport had once taken Alexander in his little pulmonary gasoline runabout to see the many buildings and rows of buildings that he owned in the city. For Alexander was sole heir. They had amused Blinker very much. The houses looked so incapable of producing the big sums of money that Lawyer Oldport kept piling up in banks for him to spend. In the evening Blinker went to one of his clubs, intending to dine. Nobody was there except some old fogies playing whist who spoke to him with grave politeness and glared at him with savage contempt. Everybody was out of town. But here he was kept in like a schoolboy to write his name over and over on pieces of paper. His wounds were deep. Blinker turned his back on the fogies, and said to the club steward who had come forward with some nonsense about cold fresh salmon roe: “Symons, I’m going to Coney Island.” He said it as one might say: “All’s off; I’m going to jump into the river.” The joke pleased Symons. He laughed within a sixteenth of a note of the audibility permitted by the laws governing employees. “Certainly, sir,” he tittered. “Of course, sir, I think I can see you at Coney, Mr. Blinker.” Blinker got a paper and looked up the movements of Sunday steamboats. Then he found a cab at the first corner and drove to a North River pier. He stood in line, as democratic as you or I, and bought a ticket, and was trampled upon and shoved forward until, at last, he found himself on the upper deck of the boat staring brazenly at a girl who sat alone upon a camp stool. But Blinker did not intend to be brazen; the girl was so wonderfully good looking that he forgot for one minute that he was the prince incog, and behaved just as he did in society. She was looking at him, too, and not severely. A puff of wind threatened Blinker’s straw hat. He caught it warily and settled it again. The movement gave the effect of a bow. The girl nodded and smiled, and in another instant he was seated at her side. She was dressed all in white, she was paler than Blinker imagined milkmaids and girls of humble stations to be, but she was as tidy as a cherry blossom, and her steady, supremely frank gray eyes looked out from the intrepid depths of an unshadowed and untroubled soul. “How dare you raise your hat to me?” she asked, with a smile-redeemed severity. “I didn’t,” Blinker said, but he quickly covered the mistake by extending it to “I didn’t know how to keep from it after I saw you.” “I do not allow gentlemen to sit by me to whom I have not been introduced,” she said, with a sudden haughtiness that deceived him. He rose reluctantly, but her clear, teasing laugh brought him down to his chair again. “I guess you weren’t going far,” she declared, with beauty’s magnificent self-confidence. “Are you going to Coney Island?” asked Blinker.