Fifth Avenue in New York. I guess I can do well enough in either place
so long as the rest of you are satisfied."

It had been all the same to Mrs. Bines for as many years as a woman of
fifty can remember. It was the lot of wives in her day and environment
early to learn the supreme wisdom of abolishing preferences. Riches and
poverty, ease and hardship, mountain and plain, town and wilderness,
they followed in no ascertainable sequence, and a superiority of
indifference to each was the only protection against hurts from the
unexpected.

This trained neutrality of Mrs. Bines served her finely now. She had no
leading to ally herself against her children in their wish to go East,
nor against Uncle Peter Bines in his stubborn effort to keep them West.
She folded her hands to wait on the others.

And the battle raged.

The old man, sole defender of the virtuous and stalwart West against an
East that he alleged to be effete and depraved, had now resorted to
sarcasm,--a thing that Mr. Carlyle thought was as good as the language
of the devil.

"And here, now, how about this dog-luncheon?" he continued, glancing at
a New York newspaper clutched accusingly in his hand. "It was give, I
see, by one of your Newport cronies. Now, that's healthy doin's fur a
two-fisted Christian, ain't it? I want to know. Shappyronging a select
company of lady and gentlemen dogs from soup to coffee; pressing a
little more of the dog-biscuit on this one, and seein' that the other
don't misplay its finger-bowl no way. How I would love to read of a