you sat eating _fraises des bois_ smothered in
thick _creme d'Isigny_. Or the Piazzi di Spagna on Easter Sunday with
the murmur of Rome in your ears and the cars and carriages flashing
through the green-gold shadows of the Pincio. Or Hyde Park in May,
with the sun sifting through the brave old trees and flashing on the
helmets of the Life Guards as the King goes by in a scarlet uniform
with the blue Order of the Garter on his breast, or Park Lane on a
glorious light-and-shadow afternoon in June and a dip into the
familiar old Americanized clangor at the Cecil; or Chinkie's place in
Devonshire about a month earlier, sitting out on the terrace wrapped
in steamer-rugs and waiting for the moon to come up and the first
nightingale to sing. Of Fifth Avenue shining almost bone-white in the
clear December sunlight and the salted nuts and orange-blossom
cocktails at Sherry's, or the Plaza tea-room at about five o'clock in
the afternoon with the smell of Turkish tobacco and golden pekoe and
hot-house violets and Houbigant's _Quelque-fleurs_ all tangled up
together. Or the City of Wild Parsley in March with a wave of wild
flowers breaking over the ruins of Selinunte and the tumbling pillars
of the Temple of Olympian Zeus lying time-mellowed in the clear
Sicilian sunlight!

They were all lovely enough, and still are, I suppose, but it's a
loveliness in some way involved with youth. So the memory of those
far-off gaieties, which, after all, were so largely physical, no
longer touch me with unrest. They're wine that's drunk and water
that's run under the bridge. Younger lips can drink of that cup, which
was sweet enough in its time. Let the newer girls dance their legs off
under the French crystals of the Ritz, and powder their noses over the
Fountain of the Sunken Boat, and eat the numbered duck so
reverentially doled out at La Tour d'Argent and puff their cigarettes
behind the beds of begonias and marguerites at the Chateau Madrid.
They too will get tired of it, and step aside for others. For the
petal falls from the blossom and the blossom plumps out into fruit.
And all those golden girls, when their day is over, must slip away
from those gardens of laughter. When they don't, they only make
themselves ridiculous. For there's nothing sadder than an antique lady
of other days decking herself out in the furbelows of a lost youth.
And I've got Dinky-Dunk's overalls to patch and my bread to set, so I
can't think much more about it to-