“However!  I want to make myself clear.  Am I a high-brow?  Not at all.  I want good clothes—­I love to shop—­and I propose to go on shopping.  If you do not, let me tell you, my dears, that the men in New York are like all the rest—­and you would soon be leading a very lonely existence!  And I don’t want that, I want bushels of friends—­and some of them men—­decidedly!  I want to dance and dine about—­but I don’t want to be religious about it!  Nor frantic and get myself into a state!

“Well, but I did start out like that.  When I came here to live—­” She hesitated.  “No, I’d better scratch that out.”

“Thank Heaven I got married,” she wrote, “and fell in love with my husband.”  Again she stopped with a quick frown.  “And I had a baby.  And I began to find something real.”  Another pause, a long one.

“I had quite a struggle after that.  I was all hemmed in—­” she stopped again—­“by the city I found when I first arrived.  But I huffed and I puffed and I hunted about—­and at last I discovered our New York—­the town we girls used to dream about at home in all those talks we had!  Oh, I don’t mean I have found it yet—­but I’ve felt it, though, and had one good look.  I dined with some people.  How silly that sounds.  But never mind—­the point is not me, but the fact that this city is really and truly crammed full of the things we girls used to get so excited about—­Art, you know, and Music of course, and people who make these things their God.  The town opens up if you look at it right—­and you find Movements—­Politics—­you hear people talk—­you see suffrage parades—­I marched in one not long ago feeling like Joan of Arc!  And you find men, too, who are doing things.  Big schemes for skyscrapers and homes!  I mean that our New York is here!”

Again there came a pause in the writing.  Her eyes looked excited.  She smiled and frowned.  Now to finish it off!

“What I want of it all I am not yet sure—­for me personally, I mean.  But there is my husband, to begin with, and his work that I can help grow—­and his old friends.  And they are not all.  I keep hearing of new ones I must meet—­and they are mixed in with all those things I have discovered in the town.  A few of these people were born here—­but most have come from all over the country.  Sometimes I shut my eyes and ask—­’Where are you now, all over the land, you others who are to come to New York and be friends of mine and of my children?’

“I want children—­more than one.  How many I am not quite sure.  That’s another point—­you decide these things.”  She frowned and scratched this sentence out.  “And children grow—­and the idea of bringing them up makes me feel very young and humble, too.  But in that we are all in the same boat—­for the whole country, I suppose, is a good deal the same.  What a queer and puzzling, gorgeous age we are just beginning—­all of us!  I wonder what I shall make of it?  What shall I be like ten years from now?  How much shall I mean to my husband—­and to other men and women?  But most of all to women—­for we are coming together so!  I wonder what we shall make of it all?  I wonder how much we women who march—­march on and on to everything—­are really going to mean in the world!