you remember the time when we went to town to buy the trappings for the
boys' first tree and were detained until Christmas morning by the delay
of a cable I had to wait for? After dinner Christmas Eve we coaxed Miss
Lavinia out with us and bought half a bushel of jolly little toys from
street fakirs to take home, and then boarded an elevated train and rode
about the city until after midnight, in and out the downtown streets and
along the outskirts, to see all the poor people's Christmas trees in the
second stories of tenements, cheap flats, and over little shops. How she
enjoyed it, and said that she never dreamed that tenement people could be
so happy; and she finally waxed so enthusiastic that she gave a silver
half dollar each to four little newsboys crouching over the steam on a
grating in Twenty-third Street, and when they cheered her and a policeman
came along, we told the dear old soul that he evidently thought her a
suspicious character, a counterfeiter at the very least. And she always
spoke afterward with bated breath on the dangers of the streets late at
night, and her narrow escape from arrest. We came to New York unsated and
without responsibilities to push us, and looked from the outside in.

"No, Barbara, you did better than you knew that day six years ago, when
we sat in the Somerset garden, and you persuaded me to become a commuter
and let you plant a garden, promising never to talk about servants, and
you've kept your word. I was dubious then, but now--if you only knew the
tragedies I've seen among men of my means and aims these last few years,
the struggle to be in the swim, or rather the backwater of it. The
disappointment, the debt and despair, the pink teas and blue dinners
given in cramped flats, the good fellows afraid to say no to wives whose
hearts are set on being thought 'in it,' and the wives, haggard and
hollow-eyed because the husbands wish to keep the pace by joining clubs
that are supposedly the hall-marks of the millionnaire. New York is the
best place for doing everything in but three--to be born in, to live in,