"The middle-aged French women who now, as always, hold their own in
public life have better tact, and make the cultivation of some
intellectual quality or political scheme at least the excuse for holding
their salons, and not the mere excuse of rivalry in money spending.

"I find the very vocabulary altered--for _rest_ read _change_, for
_sleep_ read _stimulation_, etc, _ad infin_.

"Born a clergyman's daughter of the old regime, I was always obliged to
be more conservative than was really natural to my temperament; even so,
I find myself at middle life with comfortable means (owing to that bit of
rock and mud of grandma's on the old Bloomingdale road that father
persistently kept through thick and thin), either obliged to compromise
myself, alter my dress and habits, go to luncheons where the prelude is a
cocktail, and the after entertainment to play cards for money, contract
bronchitis by buzzing at afternoon teas, make a vocation of charity,
or--stay by myself,--these being the only forms of amusement left open,
and none offering the intimate form of social intercourse I need.

"I did mission schools and parish visiting pretty thoroughly and
conscientiously during forty years of my life,--on my return an
ecclesiastical, also, as well as a social shock awaited me. St. Jacob's
has been made a free church, and my special department has been given in
charge of two newly adopted Deaconesses, 'both for the betterment of
parish work and reaching of the poor.' So be it, but Heaven help those
who are neither rich nor poor enough to be of consequence and yet are
spiritually hungry.

"The church system is necessarily reduced to mathematics. The rector has