I don't believe Vic had half so much fun at her first ball as I had at mine, although hers is so many seasons ago now that I can't remember what she said about it. I was only a little girl then, and she wasn't in the habit of telling me things, as she is now. Although I didn't get to bed till after two, I was up early next morning, because I had promised my best cadets that I would be at morning parade, or whatever they call it, to say good-bye. Sally went with me, and it was quite an affecting parting. I shall never forget those dear boys if I live to be a hundred, though I can't remember any of their names, as after all I lost the card I meant to keep always. VI ABOUT THE PARK AND LOVE STORIES All the preparations that Mrs. Ess Kay had to make for Newport kept us two more days in New York; and it was terribly hot, but I was not sorry to stay, because we did so many amusing things. Mr. Doremus was detained too--by his tailor, he said--so we saw a good deal of him, as Mrs. Van der Windt had left for her Newport cottage. We did go to a roof garden entertainment, after all, and it was most fascinating, but quite without the feeling that you might fall off, which I had expected to have. I saw the moon coming up, and gilding thousands of roofs, and I couldn't help wondering which was the roof of that club where poor, handsome Jim Brett was employed; though of course it was impossible to speak of him to anyone except Vivace. We lunched one day at an enormous and very fashionable red brick hotel called the Waldorf-Astoria, and went into a Turkish Room, and had delicious things to eat in a beautiful restaurant, which had not at all an out-of-season air, though Mrs. Ess Kay said that most of the well-groomed looking people whom I suspected of being leaders of the Four Hundred were only "trippers." I do wonder, by the way, why one always has an innate sense of contempt for trippers, and longs to be sniffy and show one's own superiority? We must all be trippers somewhere and sometimes, or we would never see anything of the world; indeed I suppose I am by way of being a tripper now. But one never seems to regard one's self in such a light, or imagine that anybody else could be so undiscerning.