_Round-robin Letter to Mrs. Horace Allen's Neighbors and Friends in Belton, New Jersey_ Bayonne, France, May 25, 1898. MES CHERE AMIES: Je vous demande pardon for being so late with this letter, I know I promised to write just as soon as we got here. But, chere amies, I know you would forgive me if you knew how _marvelous_ our new life is here in this old, beautiful, _civilized_ world. I have just been letting myself go in it, just _grabbing_ at its charm and wonder, and all I can tell you is that Europe is even more _wonderful_ than I thought. I just wish every one of you could persuade your husbands, as I did, to take a position that will bring you across the seas to this "fabled old land of story and art." _You owe it to your children_ to give them the culture which they would get here. But let me begin first with the material things. Mr. Allen, you know, felt sort of badly because the position here didn't seem to be as important and have as big a salary as the job the Company offered him in Chicago--_Chicago_! Well, you cannot imagine anything like the cheapness of the life here. We have two flats of six rooms each, on the same floor, just the landing between them, twelve rooms in all, furnished elaborately down to the last little things in the kitchen even, and we pay about half the rent we paid in Belton for our unfurnished house. There is perhaps a little old-world dinginess about the wall-paper and the curtains and things, but that only adds to the delightful _atmosphere_ and makes you realize that you are really in old Europe and not raw young America. We have two maids for _less than three dollars a week_ each, and such maids! In America we haven't any idea what it is to have good servants. I am not expected to lift my hand or think about the housekeeping. My old cook, the most _fas_cinating creature, in a quaint peasant's costume, takes _all_ the responsibility on her own shoulders. She gets up frightfully early in the morning, and goes off to market with a big, flat basket, and comes bringing it in _on her head_ all filled with the loveliest things to eat you ever saw, and bought for almost nothing! But she buys just as closely for me as she would for herself. Servants identify themselves with the family of their masters here, and are glad to! I know the word "masters" sounds very un-American; but one so soon gets used to the vocabulary of the country. Pardonnez moi!