“Oscar writes that Flora isn’t well, that all her other guests are gone except you—­and that she wants me.  But why should I come?  I wish he wouldn’t ask me.  Something always tugs at my heart when I think of Flora.  She has so much and yet so little.  She and Oscar would be much happier in a flat on the West Side with Flora cooking in a kitchenette, and Oscar bringing things home from the delicatessen.  He would buy bologna and potato salad on Sunday nights, and perhaps they would slice up a raw onion.  It sounds dreadful, doesn’t it?  But there are thousands of people doing just that thing, Georgie, and being very happy over it.  And it wouldn’t be dreadful for Flora and Oscar because they would be right where they belong, and the potato salad and the bologna and the little room where Oscar could sit with his coat off would be much more to their liking than their present pomp and elegance.  You and I are different.  You could never play any part pleasantly but that of Prince Charming, and I should hate the kitchenette.  I want wide spaces, and old houses, and deep fireplaces—­my people far back were like that—­I sometimes wonder why I stick to Flora—­perhaps it is because she clung to me in those days when Oscar was drafted and had to go, and she cried so hard in the Red Cross rooms that I took her under my wing——­ Take it all together, Flora is rather worth while and so is Oscar if he didn’t try so hard to be what he is not.

“But then we are all trying rather hard to be what we are not.  I am really and truly middle-class.  In my mind, I mean.  Yet no one would believe it to look at me, for I wear my clothes like a Frenchwoman, and I am as unconventional as English royalty.  And two generations of us have inherited money.  But back of that there were nice middle-class New Englanders who did their own work.  And the women wore white aprons, and the men wore overalls, and they ate doughnuts for breakfast, and baked beans on Sunday, and they milked their own cows, and skimmed their own cream, and they read Hamlet and the King James version of the Bible, and a lot of them wrote things that will be remembered throughout the ages, and they had big families and went to church, and came home to overflowing hospitality and chicken pies—­and they were the salt of the earth.  And as I think I remarked to you once before, I want to be like my great-grandmother in my next incarnation, and live in a wide, low farmhouse, and have horses and hogs and chickens and pop-corn on snowy nights, and go to church on Sunday.

“I don’t know why I am writing like this, except that I went to Trinity to vespers, when I stopped over in Boston.  It was dim and quiet and the boys’ voices were heavenly, and over it all brooded the spirit of the great man who once preached there—­and who still preaches——­

“And now it is Sunday again, and I am back at the Crossing, and I played golf all the morning, and bridge this afternoon, and all the women smoked and all the men, and I was in a blue haze, and I wanted to be back in the quiet church where the boys sang, and the lights were like stars——­