This sort of thing, unless one happily possesses a temperament unusually innocent and robust, has but one result: holidays become mere dates on a calendar. They are welcome intruders if one happens to be tied down day after day, as most of us are, to any one exacting and monotonous occupation, but the way to enjoy them, to extract the best from them is, I have found, to ignore them. It is an immeasurable satisfaction when you at last haul down the flag and tell yourself that you don’t in the least care what other people are doing on a certain day; when you finally cast out the disturbing belief that you ought to engage in some irritating or melancholy activity, generally supposed to be in keeping with the occasion. To observe Christmas by not observing it at all but by doing what you really feel like doing on a day of leisure, to dine on bread and butter and a cup of tea on Thanksgiving Day because they are what you most want, to seek on the Fourth of July a locality in which there is absolute quiet, all require some courage and, I regret to say, a certain age, but it is worth it. SERVANTS Polite existence seems to be composed, in part, of a warp (or do I, perhaps, mean a woof?) of funny little pretensions and affectations, of rather meaningless standards and conventions, make-believes and poses. The polite world, broadly speaking, always seems to be divided into two classes; those who swallow it all whole, who believe in it, who practice and live up to it, and those who really don’t, but who pretend they do for fear of forfeiting the esteem of the others. We all know persons who quite simply have been born into the world with what might be called aristocratic temperaments and instincts. They do not affect it; they cannot help it; it is innate, and they automatically observe the conventions because they like to, because it is the line of least resistance. On the other hand, no end of us go through almost precisely the same motions, but without conviction, and, when we feel reasonably sure that we sha’n’t be found out, we relax and give a certain amount of free play to what happens to be our natures.