“Absence of dogs,” Miss Henrietta was saying. “I’m ever so glad they don’t allow dogs in this park. It’s the only spot left in the city where one may walk without constantly scanning the pavement beneath one’s feet. A disgusting animal, the dog. It leaves its dirt anywhere at all. The cat is infinitely more fastidious, isn’t it? Not that I would care to have one underfoot. I’ve never understood this compulsion people have to bring animals into their houses. Why, I wouldn’t even care to have a fur coat. Let that sort of thing stay in the forest where it belongs.”

I’m sure Miss Henrietta wouldn’t have talked thus to a stranger. But strangers, like dogs, are not to be found in Gramercy Park. My presence in the park indicated that I was decent and respectable, that I had a rewarding occupation or an independent income, that I was one of Us and not one of Them. My clothes had certainly been chosen to reinforce that image. My suit was a tropical worsted, a windowpane check in light and dark gray. My shirt was light blue with a medium-length button-down collar. My tie carried stripes of silver and sky blue on a navy field. The attaché case at my feet was a slim model in cocoa Ultrasuede that had cost someone a pretty penny.

I looked, all in all, like a bachelor taking a breather in the park after a hard day in a stuffy office. Perhaps I’d stopped somewhere for a bracing brace of martinis. Now I was taking some air on this balmy September evening before I trotted on home to my well-appointed apartment, there to pop a TV dinner in the microwave oven and inhale a beer or two while the Mets dropped a squeaker on the tube.

Well, not quite, Miss Henrietta.

No hard day, no stuffy office. No martinis, because I do not permit myself so much as a sniff of the cork when I am about to go to work. And there’s no microwave oven in my modest apartment, and no TV dinners either, and I stopped watching the Mets when they traded Seaver. My apartment’s on the Upper West Side, several miles from Gramercy Park, and I didn’t pay a cent for the Ultrasuede attaché case, having appropriated it some months ago while liberating an absent gentleman’s coin collection. I’m sure it had cost him a pretty penny, and God knows it contained any number of pretty pennies when I waltzed out the door with it in hand.