"I have been here for over three years--but it was hard to write before, because everything was far from clear." She stopped and frowned. "How much shall I tell them?" An eagerness to be frank and tell all was mingled with that feeling of Anglo-Saxon reticence which had been bred in Ethel's soul back in the town in Ohio. "Besides, I haven't time," she thought. "I feel," she wrote, "as though I were just out of danger--barely out. In danger, I mean, of nervously dashing about after nothing until I got wrinkled and old at forty--nerves in shreds. I might have done that. I have met a nerve specialist lately--and the stories he has told me about women in this town! "However! I want to make myself clear. Am I a high-brow? Not at all. I want good clothes--I love to shop--and I propose to go on shopping. If you do not, let me tell you, my dears, that the men in New York are like all the rest--and you would soon be leading a very lonely existence! And I don't want that, I want bushels of friends--and some of them men--decidedly! I want to dance and dine about--but I don't want to be religious about it! Nor frantic and get myself into a state! "Well, but I did start out like that. When I came here to live--" She hesitated. "No, I'd better scratch that out." "Thank Heaven I got married," she wrote, "and fell in love with my husband." Again she stopped with a quick frown. "And I had a baby. And I began to find something real." Another pause, a long one. "I had quite a struggle after that. I was all hemmed in--" she stopped again--"by the city I found when I first arrived. But I huffed and I puffed and I hunted about--and at last I discovered our New York--the town we girls used to dream about at home in all those talks we had! Oh, I don't mean I have found it yet--but I've felt it, though, and had one good look. I dined with some people. How silly that sounds. But never mind--the point is not me, but the fact that this city is really and truly crammed full of the things we girls used to get so excited about--Art, you know, and Music of course, and people who make these things their God. The town opens up if you look at it right--and you find Movements--Politics--you hear people talk--you see suffrage parades--I marched in one not long ago feeling like Joan of Arc! And you find men, too, who are doing things. Big schemes for skyscrapers and homes! I mean that our New York is here!" Again there came a pause in the writing. Her eyes looked excited. She smiled and frowned. Now to finish it off!