Making a mental note not to speak too suddenly at the next encounter, the two cheerful derelicts drifted along the sunny coast of Grand Avenue. A shining and passionless peace presided over the streets. A gentle clop-clop of hooves came trotting down the way: here was a man driving a white horse in a neat rubber-tired buggy without a top. He leaned back and smiled to himself as he drove along. Life did not seem to be the same desperate venture it appears round about Broadway and Wall Street. Who can describe the settled amiability of those rows of considerable brown houses, with their heavy oak doors, their pots of daisies on the stoop, their clear window panes, and now and then the face of a benignant grandmother peeping from behind lace curtains. The secret of Brooklyn, perhaps, is contentment, and its cautious residents do not want the rest of us to know too much about it, lest we all flock over there in swarms.
We then came to the bustle of Fulton Street, which deserves a book in itself. Some day we want to revisit a certain section of Fulton Street where (if we remember rightly) a rotisserie and a certain bookstore conspire to make one of the pleasantest haunts in our experience. We don't know exactly what the secret of Brooklyn may be, but we are going to spend some time over there this spring and lie in wait for it.
ON WAITING FOR THE CURTAIN TO GO UP
We often wonder whether people are really as human as they appear, or is it only our imagination? Everybody, we suggest, thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also (we are not dogmatic on this matter) seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of vivid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.
For example, consider the demeanour of people at a theatre while waiting for the curtain to go up. To note the censoriousness with which they study each other, one concludes that each deems himself (herself) singularly blessed as the repository of human correctness.
Incidentally, why is it that one gets so thirsty at the theatre? We never get thirsty at the movies, or not nearly so thirsty. The other evening we drank seven paper cups full of water in the intermissions of a four-act play.