household and visitors were good-humoredly made fun of.

Unfortunately, much of the correspondence has been lost, but
bits of it have been preserved by some of us in copies or in
memory. I cannot recall everything interesting that there was in
it, but here are a few of the more interesting things from the
period of the eighties.



THE LETTER-BOX

THE old fogy continues his questions. Why, when women or old men
enter the room, does every well-bred person not only offer them a
seat, but give them up his own?

Why do they make Ushakof or some Servian officer who
comes to pay a visit necessarily stay to tea or dinner?

Why is it considered wrong to let an older person or a woman
help you on with your overcoat?

And why are all these charming rules considered obligatory
toward others, when every day ordinary people come, and we not only
do not ask them to sit down or to stop to dinner or spend the night
or render them any service, but would look on it as the height of
impropriety?

Where do those people end to whom we are under these
obligations? By what characteristics are the one sort