Henry Gilbert is a good lawyer himself, and he employed an able man to defend the will.  We determined that in this crisis we would stand by Poppas, believing it would be Cressida’s wish.  Out of the lot of them, he was the only one who had helped her to make one penny of the money that had brought her so much misery.  He was at least more deserving than the others.  We saw to it that Poppas got his fifty thousand, and he actually departed, at last, for his city in la sainte Asie, where it never rains and where he will never again have to hold a hot water bottle to his face.

The rest of the property was fought for to a finish.  Poppas out of the way, Horace and Brown and the Garnets quarrelled over her personal effects.  They went from floor to floor of the Tenth Street house.  The will provided that Cressida’s jewels and furs and gowns were to go to her sisters.  Georgie and Julia wrangled over them down to the last moleskin.  They were deeply disappointed that some of the muffs and stoles which they remembered as very large, proved, when exhumed from storage and exhibited beside furs of a modern cut, to be ridiculously scant.  A year ago the sisters were still reasoning with each other about pearls and opals and emeralds.

I wrote Poppas some account of these horrors, as during the court proceedings we had become rather better friends than of old.  His reply arrived only a few days ago; a photograph of himself upon a camel, under which is written: 

    Traulich und Treu
    ist’s nur in der Tiefe: 
    falsch und feig
ist was dort oben sich freut!

His reply, and the memories it awakens—­memories which have followed Poppas into the middle of Asia, seemingly,—­prompted this informal narration.

A Gold Slipper

Marshall McKann followed his wife and her friend Mrs. Post down the aisle and up the steps to the stage of the Carnegie Music Hall with an ill-concealed feeling of grievance.  Heaven knew he never went to concerts, and to be mounted upon the stage in this fashion, as if he were a “highbrow” from Sewickley, or some unfortunate with a musical wife, was ludicrous.  A man went to concerts when he was courting, while he was a junior partner.  When he became a person of substance he stopped that sort of nonsense.  His wife, too, was a sensible person, the daughter of an old Pittsburgh family as solid and well-rooted as the McKanns.  She would never have bothered him about this concert had not the meddlesome Mrs. Post arrived to pay her a visit.  Mrs. Post was an old school friend of Mrs. McKann, and because she lived in Cincinnati she was always keeping up with the world and talking about things in which no one else was interested, music among them.  She was an aggressive lady, with weighty opinions, and a deep voice like a jovial bassoon.  She had arrived only last night, and at dinner she brought it out that she could on no account miss Kitty Ayrshire’s recital; it was, she said, the sort of thing no one could afford to miss.