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UNCLASSIFIED

My extraordinary dream about the Crimean War.

The improper number of Life and the William’s Purple Cow cover beginning something.

Time: Henry VIII cut from a halitosis ad.

Just before quarrel had been talking about the best and what it was founded on.

She and her husband and all their friends had no principles. They were good or bad according to their natures; often they struck attitudes remembered from the past, but they were never sure, as her father and her grandfather had been sure. Confusedly she supposed it was something about religion. But how could you get principles just by wishing for them?

The war had become second-page news.

Meeting Princetonians in the army as buglers, etc.

Diary of the God Within: They got half of it—this is the other half.

Before breakfast, their horses’ hoofs sedately scattered the dew in sentimental glades, or curtained them with dust as they raced on dirt roads. They bought a tandem bicycle and pedaled all over Long Island—which a contemporary Cato considered “rather fast” for a couple not yet married.

About three pieces of the truth (specific) fitted into one of the most malicious and troublesome lies she’d ever told. These latter are permitted this indiscretion within limits as about the only surcease they will ever find in this world.

We took a place in the great echoing salon as far away from the other clients as possible, much as theatrical managers “dress a thin house,” distributing the crowd to cover as much ground as possible.

In Hendersonville: * I am living very cheaply. Today I am in comparative affluence, but Monday and Tuesday I had two tins of potted meat, three oranges and a box of Uneedas and two cans of beer. For the food, that totalled eighteen cents a day—and when I think of the thousand meals I’ve sent back untasted in the last two years. It was fun to be poor—especially you haven’t enough liver power for an appetite. But the air is fine here, and I liked what I had—and there was nothing to do about it anyhow because I was afraid to cash any checks, and I had to save enough for postage for the story. But it was funny coming into the hotel and the very deferential clerk not knowing that I was not only thousands, nay tens of thousands in debt, but had less than forty cents cash in the world and probably a deficit at my bank. I gallantly gave Scotty my last ten when I left her and of course the Flynns, etc., had no idea and wondered why I didn’t just “jump into a taxi” (four dollars and tip) and run over for dinner.

Enough of this bankrupt’s comedy—I suppose it has been enacted all over the U. S. in the last four years, plenty of times.

Nevertheless, I haven’t told you the half of it—i.e., my underwear I started with was a pair of pyjama pants—just that. It was only today I could replace them with a union suit. I washed my two handkerchiefs and my shirt every night, but the pyjama trousers I had to wear all the time, and I am presenting it to the Hendersonville Museum. My socks would have been equally notorious save there was not enough of them left, for they served double duty as slippers at night. The final irony was when a drunk man in the shop where I bought my can of ale said in a voice obviously intended for me, “These city dudes from the East come down here with their millions. Why don’t they support us?”

My great grandmother visited Dolly Madison.

It appeared on the page of great names and was illustrated by a picture of a cross-eyed young lady holding the hand of a savage gentleman with four rows of teeth. That was how their pictures came out, anyhow, and the public was pleased to know that they were ugly monsters for all their money, and everyone was satisfied all around. The society editor set up a column telling how Mrs. Van Tyne started off in the Aquitania wearing a blue traveling dress of starched felt with a round square hat to match.

From a little distance one can perceive an order in what at the time seemed confusion. The case in point is the society of a three generation Middle Western city before the war. There were the two or three enormously rich, nationally known families—outside of them rather than below them the hierarchy began. At the top came those whose grandparents had brought something with them from the East, a vestige of money and culture; then came the families of the big self-made merchants, the “old settlers” of the sixties and seventies, American-English-Scotch, or German or Irish, looking down somewhat in the order named—upon the Irish less from religious difference— French Catholics were considered rather distinguished— than from their taint of political corruption in the East. After this came certain well-to-do “new people”—mysterious, out of a cloudy past, possibly unsound. Like so many structures, this one did not survive the cataract of money that came tumbling down upon it with the war.

This preamble is necessary to explain the delicate social relation, so incomprehensible to a European, between Gladys Van Schillinger, aged fourteen, and her senior by one year, Basil Duke Lee. Basil’s father had been an unsuccessful young Kentuckian of good family and his mother, Alice Reilly, the daughter of a “pioneer” wholesale grocer. As Tarkington says, American children belong to their mother’s families, and Basil was “Alice Reilly’s son.” Gladys Van Schillinger, on the contrary—

SONGS OF 1906

Way Down in Cotton Town (Rogers Bros.).

Teasing

Coax Me

Kiss Me Goodnight, Dear Love

Don’t Get Married Anymore, Love

Waiting at the Church (Vesta Victoria).

Tale of a Kangaroo

Dearie, My Dearie

If It Takes My Whole Week’s Pay

Roosevelt and Big Stick

Princeton Glee Club

Nora Bayes and Harvest Moon