ross 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----

"I wish you and I could go there some day and that you could feel
as I do about it. But you wouldn't. You are always so sure and
smug--and you have a feeling that money will buy anything--even
Paradise. I wonder what you will be like on the next plane. You
won't fit into my farmhouse. I fancy that you'll be something
rather--devilish--like Don Juan--or perhaps you'll be just an
'ostler in a courtyard, shining boots and--kissing maids----

"Of co