But I don’t see why I should be bombarding you with these reminiscences. Perhaps, after all, you won’t see what they always mean to me, and particularly here, in this wondrously unreal environment, where the “other half” is something one merely subscribes to, or occasionally reads about in a magazine. But, you see, I _know_ the other half; at one period of my life I actually _was_ the other half. And when I confess to my skinny old dinner companion that I don’t like truffles and loathe champagne, I have the most irrelevant visions. They make a snob of me, these visions; not a snob in the general acceptation of the term, but a snob, none the less. For I continually feel that I know more about life than these people know, or ever will know. It is a source of satisfaction that I can see all around them while they are able to see only the particular front I, for the moment, wish to display. If I could choose between millions and my memories of Elm street, I think I should cling to Elm street. * * * * * That, practically, was the letter. It was pleasant in spots. I have tried, as I said, to extract some of the spots. IN THE UNDERTAKER’S SHOP Some time ago I went down town to buy a coffin. No, I didn’t say that to be startling; it is merely a bald, literal statement of fact. Now and then one goes down town to buy a book, or a pair of gloves, or some postage stamps. On this occasion I went to buy a coffin. The conventional idea of grief is that it is an exclusive emotion; that it leaves no room in the mind, for the time being, for any other. Like most of our beliefs, and most of them are erroneous, we have derived this one from books and newspapers. “Mrs. So-and-so bore up bravely to the end, but is now under the care of a physician, and is completely prostrated by grief,” one almost always reads in a newspaper account of the last hours of that altogether estimable citizen, her husband. And she sincerely believes this--believes it even while she stands in front of the glass, telling the young woman from the dry-goods shop that the veil hasn’t been pinned on straight and that the skirt is at least three inches too long in the back. There is no hypocrisy here; she does feel acutely and deeply bereaved. But she is by no means completely prostrated, and there is plenty of place in her intelligence for a variety of sensations that have little or nothing to do with her sorrow. In fact, physicians tell me that persons in ordinary “good health” are very rarely prostrated by grief; that when they are, complete prostration, on the part of gentlemen, is generally traceable to too many drinks of whisky, and on the part of ladies, to the morphine pill of the family doctor.