night. But after I've done my
chores, and before I go up to bed, I'm going to read _Rabbi Ben Ezra_
right through to the end. I'll do it in front of the fire, with my
feet up and with three Ontario Northern Spy apples on a plate beside
me, to be munched as Audrey herself might have munched them, oblivious
of any Touchstone and his reproving eyes.

I have stopped to ponder, however, how much of this morbid dread of
mine for big cities is due to that short and altogether unsatisfactory
visit to New York, to that sense of coming back a stranger and finding
old friends gone and those who were left with such entirely new
interests.

I was out of it, completely and dishearteningly out of it. And my
clothes were all wrong. My hats were wrong; my shoes were wrong; and
every rag I had on me was in some way wrong. I was a tourist from the
provinces. And I wasn't up-to-date with either what was on me or was
_in_ me. I didn't even know the new subway routes or the telephone
rules or the proper places to go for tea. The Metropolitan looked
cramped and shoddy and _Tristan_ seemed shoddily sung to me. There was
no thrill to it. And even _The Jewels of the Madonna_ impressed me as
a bit garish and off color, with the Apache Dance of the last act
almost an affront to God and man. I even asked myself, when I found
that I had lost the trick of laughing at bridal-suite farces, if it
was the possession of children that had changed me. For when you're
with children you must in some way match their snowy innocence with a
kindred coloring of innocence, very much as the hare and the weasel
and the ptarmigan turn white to match the whiteness of our northern
winter. Yet I was able to wring pure joy out of Rachmaninoff's playing
at Carnegie Hall, with a great man making music for music's sake. I
loved the beauty and balance and splendid sanity of that playing,
without keyboard fire-works and dazzle and glare. But Rachmaninoff was
the exception. Even Central Park seemed smaller than of old, and I
couldn't remember which drives Dinky-Dunk and I had taken in the
historic old hansom-cab after our equally historic marriage by
ricochet. Fifth Avenue itself was different, the caterpillar of trade
having crawled a little farther up the stalk of fashion, for the
shops, I found, went right up to the Park, and the old W. K. house
where we once danced our long-forgotten Dresden China Quadrille, in
imitation of the equally forgotten Eighty-Three event, confr