"I dwelt on that little dinner episode, my dear Barbara, because in it you will find an answer to several questions I read between your lines. Since my return I find that practically all my old friends have flown to what Archie Martin called 'a different roost,' or else failing, or having no desire so to do, have left the city altogether, leaving me very lonely. Not only those with daughters to bring out, but many of my spinster contemporaries are listed with the buds at balls and dinner dances, and their gowns and jewels described. Ah, what a fatal memory for ages one has in regard to schoolmates! Josephine Ponsonby was but one class behind us, and she is dancing away yet. "The middle-aged French women who now, as always, hold their own in public life have better tact, and make the cultivation of some intellectual quality or political scheme at least the excuse for holding their salons, and not the mere excuse of rivalry in money spending. "I find the very vocabulary altered--for _rest_ read _change_, for _sleep_ read _stimulation_, etc, _ad infin_. "Born a clergyman's daughter of the old regime, I was always obliged to be more conservative than was really natural to my temperament; even so, I find myself at middle life with comfortable means (owing to that bit of rock and mud of grandma's on the old Bloomingdale road that father persistently kept through thick and thin), either obliged to compromise myself, alter my dress and habits, go to luncheons where the prelude is a cocktail, and the after entertainment to play cards for money, contract bronchitis by buzzing at afternoon teas, make a vocation of charity, or--stay by myself,--these being the only forms of amusement left open, and none offering the intimate form of social intercourse I need. "I did mission schools and parish visiting pretty thoroughly and conscientiously during forty years of my life,--on my return an ecclesiastical, also, as well as a social shock awaited me. St. Jacob's has been made a free church, and my special department has been given in charge of two newly adopted Deaconesses, 'both for the betterment of parish work and reaching of the poor.' So be it, but Heaven help those who are neither rich nor poor enough to be of consequence and yet are spiritually hungry.