To-day was my usual Tuesday at home. Elim, in spotless white, played quietly under the tea-table most of the time with his little legs sticking out. Torrents of rain, and only a few callers, among them the German Consul-General, Rieloff, very musical, asking us for dinner, and Mrs. Cummings, handsome, competent, and warm-hearted, the wife of the head of the cable company, and a friend of Aunt Laura's since many years. Lately I have bought several beautiful old Mexican or Spanish frames. Sometimes they are inlaid with mother-of-pearl, sometimes with ivory or bone. Sometimes they are old, sometimes only so cunningly arranged to deceive the eye and fancy that they give the same pleasure. To-day a short, stubby, insistent Mestizo, from the Calle Amargura, brought me a beautiful one, and I spent a most exciting hour haggling over the price. The four evangelists are carved in mother-of-pearl at the four corners, with a charming, simple device of diamond-shaped pieces in between. A beautiful Ravell photograph of the stone sails of Guadalupe just fitted into it, and it will hang above the bookcase by my sofa. The room has many friends whom I have put in Mexican frames; Elim and Sofka, Iswolsky, the Towers, Mr. Taft, Mr. Roosevelt. A sweet one of Gladys S., with her first-born in her arms, has a soft, yellow wood frame, with an old, irregular tracing in black and ivory. I can't call Mexico a melting-pot exactly, as things don't melt here. But it is a strange place, with strange people and peculiar situations. Society here, blown together by the four winds of the earth, is a mixed affair, and various people have disappeared from the rolls since our arrival. Some come to seek, some, it would appear, because they are being sought, others still whose life demands a change of setting. It now appears that a certain agreeable foreign couple, received by everybody, had never been joined in holy matrimony. It came out between the invitation and the dinner at the ---- Legation. It was not official enough for the minister to intimate to them that the dinner was off, but definite enough to make him most uncomfortable. Everybody behaved very well, however, and as he sat at the table, his eye glancing rather anxiously about the possible field of battle, I felt quite sorry for him; but I realized that though anybody has a right to the highways, in the narrow compass of the drawing-room all must, alack! be alike. Peretti de la Rocca, the clever _conseiller_ of the French Embassy in Washington, took me out to dinner. It is he who married, when _en poste_ here, the handsome only daughter of the Suinagás', living in our street. It was very pleasant talking Washingtoniana, Mexicana, and politics. Yesterday, Sunday, I spent the day at the Del Rios' at Tlalpan, on the first slopes of the Ajusco Mountains. Von. H., who confesses openly to homesickness, took me out with Elim, and we dropped N. for the usual Sunday golf at the Country Club as we passed by.