Curious how Gladys Underbunk has warped my line of vision! More than once last night I paused to step apart from the scene, to view it from afar off, to think. It is a good thing to think sometimes. When you do, you will be surprised at the ideas that will come into your head. I don't believe I had ever really thought at a dance before, so never before had there come to me even a suggestion of an element of absurdity. It was not the people who were there that suggested it, but the people who were not, and would have given a year of their lives to be of that blessed company--the Morgan Stynes, who had moved Wall Street to get a card and had failed; the Lanigans, who had succeeded and were now whirling around an over-heated room, being bumped and jostled and trampled on, yet deemed themselves happy. Still, I suppose it is well to be seen at these very smart affairs. They are life to so many that to be absent is a sign of a social decline, which, unless checked by a few invitations, will lead to that graveyard of so many hopes--the page of the Sunday papers that tells what the clubwomen are doing. Mrs. Twitter's dance was certainly very smart. She gives two every year, and last night's was the first, the one to which she invites the people she knows. To the next she will ask her list. So last night there were about four hundred present. At the next I suspect there will be just about that many absent, including myself. I fear the house will burst, and I have no mind to run risks, and am more than satisfied that to Williegilt Bumpschus will fall the task of bringing a cotillon out of chaos. What a lot of fuss it takes, anyway, to introduce a plain daughter with millions! Still, I suppose the same is true everywhere and of all classes, for as ice-cream and angel-cake are to the Brooklynite, so are terrapin and champagne to our set. It is no more wasteful extravagance for the Twitters to spend ten thousand in one night than for some aspiring Harlemite to spread crash over the parlor floor and ruin the stair-carpet with lemonade. That is exactly the way I put it to my rector at the club the other day when he was inclined to complain of the difficulty in getting subscriptions for new altar-cloths. I don't suppose that he was at all influenced by my argument, but I noticed him last night paying devoted attention to Constance Twitter, which caused me to suspect that he might be contemplating giving up bachelor life and becoming a benefice--I think that is the term. It would really be a very sensible match, for Constance is intellectual, and could help him with his little sermons on the travels of St. Paul and the needs of the women's guild, and the rest of us might not have such continual calls to supply new apparatus for the gymnasium. She is interested in him too. I could see that at once. A collar buttoned behind has a wonderful fascination for women.