Caleb West by Francis Hopkinson Smith — Read

Mrs. Leroy was one of the few women in town who realized what Sanford and his friends had long ago discovered, -- the possibilities of New York in summer. To her it had now become its most delightful season, a season of long days and short nights -- days and nights of utter idleness, great content, and blessed peace of mind; a season when one could dine where one chose without a waiting cab and a hurried departure at the bidding of somebody else; when the eleven o'clock lecturer is silent, the afternoon tea a memory, and the epidemic of the ten-course dinner a forgotten plague.

She had grown to believe with Sanford that if one could impress the possibility of these truths upon the friends one loved, so that they, and only they, could tiptoe back into their houses, keep their blinds closed and their servants hidden, and so delude the balance of the world -- those they did not love, the uncongenial, the tiresome, the bumptious, and the aggressive -- into believing that they had fled; if this little trick could be played on the world every June, and for three long happy months only congenial spirits could spread themselves over space and eat their lotus in peace (and with their fingers, if they so pleased), then would each one discover that New York in summer could indeed be made the Eldorado of one's dreams.