I have devised a stratagem for meeting the girl across the street;
Ramsey and I are keeping the house open for the summer: the rest are away …
And now it is Fourth of July and Ramsey is away …
I have the great gloomy, the empty menacing house to myself …

So I invite the girl's little sister over, and she brings her friends,
And we have a sticky taffy-pull on the gas-stove in the hot summer afternoon …
Late in the afternoon I sit alone on the stoop, smoking,
The empty house on my back …

Children are playing in the gutter, wagons pass,
The cable cars thump along the avenue,
The stoops are thick and dark with families …

The stratagem works: out of pity the elder sister of the girl comes over to the lonely lad who was so good about taffypulls,
And I am invited to supper …

For the first time I sit in that basement dining-room, in glare of gas-flame,
In jollity of family fun, a bit Falstaffian,
And beside me sits She … I talk, true enough, but without being there at all …

That evening she and I walk down Lexington Avenue and get a soda …
We talk everything and nothing …
The next night I try to kiss her, and am cast out for a three days' cooling …

When Ramsey returns he is amazed and hurt to find his comrade, male like himself,
Betraying the sex for a mere girl …