I said, “That’s the one, the one with the roof. Take a good look at that house; you’ll see it has an inside as well as an outside.”
“I can’t see the inside,” Dorry shouted.
“Can you see the outside?” I asked him. “Well, the inside is just inside of the outside. If you took the outside away there wouldn’t be any inside. You can do that by algebra.”
I said, “There are two stories in that house and we have to put some adventure into those stories.”
Pee-wee shouted, “I’ll go ahead and ring the bell and tell them we want to go through, hey? Because I know what to say.” Then he said to the girls, “You can watch me if you want to. Maybe some time you’ll be on a bee-line hike and want to go through a house and then you’ll know just how to do.”
One of them said, “Oh, thank you so much.”
“The pleasure is ours,” I told her. “If the civilized population wants to follow us, what do we care?”
Then I said, “Ready—go!”
We all marched across the green with Pee-wee ahead of us and those girls coming along behind, laughing. You couldn’t blame them because the kid looked awful funny—very brave and bold. We all stopped on the walk in front of the house. It was a dandy big house; it looked like one of those houses that has a hall running straight through to the back. That’s the kind of neutral territory I like.