Were I not sure I should quite wear out the forbearance of gentle reader, I should linger to describe this marvelous charity plant for providing idle or social-position-hunting rich women with spiritual pleasures-- I had almost said debaucheries, but that would be intruding my private and perhaps prejudiced opinion. I have no desire to irritate, much less shake the faith of, those who believe in Holy Cross and its “uplift” work. And I don’t suppose Holy Cross does any great amount of harm. The poor who prostitute themselves to its purposes are weak things, beyond redemption. As for the rich who waste time and money there, would they not simply waste elsewhere were there no Holy Cross? My wife was, at that time, a very ignorant woman, thinly covered with a veneer of what I now know was a rather low grade of culture. That veneer impressed me. It had impressed our Brooklyn friends of St. Mary’s. But I fancy it must have looked cheap to expert eyes. Where her surpassing shrewdness showed itself was in that she herself recognized her own shortcomings. Rare and precious is the vanity that comforts and sustains without self-deception. She knew she wasn’t the real thing, knew she had not yet got hold of the real thing. And when she began to move about, cautiously and quietly, in Holy Cross, she realized that at last she was in the presence of the real thing. My big responsibilities, my associations in finance, had been giving me a superb training in worldly wisdom. I think I had almost as strong a natural aptitude for “catching on” to the better thing in speech and manner and in dress as had Edna. It is not self-flattery for me to say that up to the Holy Cross period I was further advanced than she. Certainly I ought to have been, for a man has a much better opportunity than a woman, and one of the essentials of equipment for great affairs is ability to observe accurately the little no less than the large. Looking back, I recall things which lead me to suspect that Edna saw my superiority in certain matters most important to her, and was irritated by it. However that may be, a few months in Holy Cross and she had grasped the essentials of the social art as I, or any other masculine man, never could grasp it. And her veneer of “middle-class” culture disappeared under a thick and enduring coating of the best New York manner. “What has become of _you_?” I said to her. “I haven’t seen you in weeks.” “I don’t understand,” said she, ruffling as she always did when she suspected me of indulging in my coarse and detestable sense of humor. “Why, you don’t act like yourself at all,” said I. “Even when we’re alone you give the uncomfortable sense of dressed-up--not as if _you_ were ‘dressed-up,’ but as if _I_ were. I feel like a plowboy before a princess.” She was delighted!