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