Once, when I was galloping along the road in imitation of a horse, with him perched on my shoulders—
"Say, Johnnie, I like you ... I won't call you buzzer any more!"
"I like you, too, Daniel, but don't squeeze me so hard about the neck ... it's choking my wind off."
That was a happy month ... that month of fine, fairly warm fall weather that Darrie, Hildreth, Daniel and I spent together in the little cottage back in the woods, secluded from the road.
The newspapers had begun to let up on us a little. It had grown a bit galling and monotonous, the continual misrepresentations of ourselves and what Hildreth and I were trying to stand for.
Now that I was playing the conventional game of evasion and hypocritic subterfuge, holding a nominal lodging at Mrs. Rond's as one Mr. Arthur Mallory, and explaining my being seen with Mrs. Baxter by the statement that I was a writer sent down by a publishing house for the purpose of helping her with a book she was engaged in writing—
Though everybody knew well who I was, it assuaged the American passion for outward "respectability," and we were left, comparatively speaking, alone to do as we wished....