It has downed you, old man. You
have changed from a maverick into a butterick."
"Don't see exactly what you are driving at," said William. "I don't wear
an alpaca coat with blue trousers and a seersucker vest on dress
occasions, like I used to do at home. You talk about being cut to a
pattern--well, ain't the pattern all right? When you're in Rome you've
got to do as the Dagoes do. This town seems to me to have other alleged
metropolises skinned to flag stations. According to the railroad
schedule I've got in mind, Chicago and Saint Jo and Paris, France, are
asterisk stops--which means you wave a red flag and get on every other
Tuesday. I like this little suburb of Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson. There's
something or somebody doing all the time. I'm clearing $8,000 a year
selling automatic pumps, and I'm living like kings-up. Why, yesterday, I
was introduced to John W. Gates. I took an auto ride with a wine agent's
sister. I saw two men run over by a street car, and I seen Edna May
play in the evening. Talk about the West, why, the other night I woke
everybody up in the hotel hollering. I dreamed I was walking on a board
sidewalk in Oshkosh. What have you got against this town, Jack? There's
only one thing in it that I don't care for, and that's a ferryboat.
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