n no reason to visit it, and had I ventured to it I would have
seen little save a tiny park bounded on four sides by houses of
shabby gentility, for the most part detached, and of a style of
architecture long since surrendered to more undesirable designs. The
park is but an open space whose straggly trees and stunted shrubs and
dusty grass add dejection to the atmosphere of shrinking
respectability which the neighborhood still makes effort to maintain;
but that, too, I have learned to love, for I see in it that which I
never noticed in the large and handsome parks up-town.

As a place of residence this section of the city I am just beginning
to know has become very interesting to me. No one of importance
lives near it, and the occupants of its houses, realizing their
social submergence and pecuniary impotence, have too long existed in
the protection of obscurity to venture into the publicity which civic
attention necessitates, and on first acquaintance it is not
attractive. I agree with my friends in that. I did not come here
because I thought it was an attractive place in which to live.

They cannot say, however, even my most protesting friends, that I am
not living in a perfectly proper neighborhood. The front of my house
faces, beyond the discouraged little park, a strata of streets which
unfold from lessening degrees of dreariness and dinginess to
ever-increasing expensiveness and unashamed architectural
extravaganzas, to the summit of residential striving, called, for
impressiveness, the Avenue, but behind it is a section of the city of
which I am as ignorant as if it were in the depths of the sea or the
wilds of primeval forest. I have traveled much, but I do not know
the city wherein I live. I know but a part of it, the pretty part.

There was something Mrs. Mundy wanted to say to me to-night, and did
not say. I love the dear soul. I could not live here without her,
could not learn what I am learning without her help and sympathy and
loyalty, but at times I wish she were a bit less fond of chatting.
She is greatly puzzled. She, too, cannot understand why I have come
to Scarborough Square to live, and I am quite certain she thinks it
strange I do not tell her. How can I tell that of which I am not
sure myself--that is, clearly and definitely sure?

I am not trying to be sure. It is enough that I am here, free to
come and go as I choose, to plan my day as I wish, to have time for
the things I once