But here--the sun bursts a shower of little golden balloons from the high
windows. The green of a park makes a cool salaam to the beetle-topped
traffic of automobiles. Rubber tires roll down the wide avenue and make a
sound like the drawn-out striking of a match. Marble columns, fountains,
incompleted architectural elegancies, two sculptured lions and the
baffling effulgence of a cinder-veiled museum offer themselves like
pensively anonymous guests. And we walk like Pierrots and Pierrettes, like
John Drews and Jack Barrymores and Leo Ditrichsteins; like Nazimovas,
Patricia Collinges and Messalinas on parole.

* * * * *

I have squandered an afternoon seduced from labors by this Pied Piper of a
street. And not only I but everybody I ever knew or heard of was in this
street, strutting up and down as if there were no vital projects demanding
their attention, as if life were not a stern and productive routine. And
where was the Rotary Club? Not a sign of the Rotary Club. One billboard
would have saved me; the admonitions that "work is man's duty to his
nation," that my country needed me as much in peace as in war, would have
scattered the insidious spell of this street and sent me back to the
typewriter with at least a story of some waiter in a loop beanery who was
once a reigning prince of Patagonia.

But there was no sign, no billboard to inspire me with a sense of duty. So
we strutted--the long procession of us--a masquerade of leisure and
complacency. Here was a street in which a shave and a haircut, a shine and
a clean collar exhilarated a man with a feeling of power and virtue. As if
there were nothing else to the day than to decorate himself for the
amusement of others.