You admit that your imagination would fall short of such heights and ask Katherine if you are going up to the far end of the 'bus run--to that great group of buildings--university, cathedral, hospital, divinity school--that have been gathered just beyond the northwestern corner of Central Park. "No, I think not," she quickly decides, "You know that Columbia is not to New York as Harvard is to Boston. Harvard dominates Boston, Columbia is but a peg in the educational system of New York. The best families here do not bow to its fetich. They are quite as apt to send their boys to Yale or Princeton--even Harvard." "Then there's the cathedral and the Drive," you venture. "We have a cathedral right here on Fifth avenue that is finished and, in its way, quite as beautiful. And as for the Drive--it is merely a rim of top-heavy and expensive apartment houses. The West Side is no longer extremely smart. The truth of the matter is that we must pause for afternoon tea." You ignore that horrifying truth for an instant. "What has happened to the poor West Side?" you demand. Katherine all but lowers her voice to a whisper. "Twenty years ago and it had every promise of success. It looked as if Riverside Drive would surpass the Avenue as a street of fine residences. The side streets were preëminently nice. Then came the subway--and with it the apartment houses. After that the very nice folk began moving to the side streets in the upper Fifties, the Sixties and the Seventies between Park and Fifth avenues." "Suppose that the apartment houses should begin to drift in there--in any numbers?" you demand. "Lord knows," says Katherine, and with due reverence adds: "There is the last stand of the prosperous New Yorker with an old-fashioned notion that he and his would like to live in a detached house. The Park binds him in on the West, the tenement district and Lexington avenue on the East--to the North Harlem and the equally impossible Bronx. The old guard is standing together." "There is Brooklyn?" you venture. "No New Yorker," says Katherine, with withering scorn, "ever goes publicly to Brooklyn unless he is being buried in Greenwood cemetery." * * * * *