d, simply
held in check; country vitality shut off from certain ways for six months
is not quickly exhausted, but, on the other hand, when it is spent, it
takes several months to recuperate.

The first night that I leave home for these little excursions I have a
sense of virtue and simmering self-congratulation. I feel that I am doing
a sensible thing in making a break from what the theorists call "the
narrowing evenness of domestic existence." Of course it is a good thing
for me to leave father and the boys, and see and hear something new to
take back report of to them; it is better for them to be taught
appreciation of me by absence; change is beneficial to every one, etc.,
etc., and all that jargon.

The second night I am still true to the theory, but am convinced that to
the highly imaginative, a city day and its doings may appear like the
Biblical idea of eternity--reversed--"a thousand years." The third
night I am painfully sure of this, and if I remain away over a fourth,
which is very rare, I cast the whole theory out to the winds of
scepticism, and am so restless and disagreeable that Evan usually
suggests that I take a morning train home and do not wait for him, which
is exactly the responsibility that I wish him to assume, thus saving me
from absolute surrender.

We always have a good time on our outings, and yet after each the
pleasure of return grows keener, so that occasionally Evan remonstrates
and says: "Sometimes I cannot understand your attitude; you appear to
enjoy every moment keenly, and yet when you go home you act as if you had
mercifully escaped from a prison that necessitated going through a sort
of thanksgiving ceremony. It seems very irrational."

But when I ask him if it would be more rational to be sorry to come home,
he does not answer,--at least not in words.

"Where do we dine to-night?" I asked Evan, as he was giving unmistakable
signs of "meditation," and I heard by the footsteps overhead that Miss
Lavinia was stirring.

"At the Art and Nature Club. You can dress as much or as little as you
please, and we can get a table in a cosey corner, and afterward sit about
upstairs for an hour, for there will be music to-night. I have asked
Martin Cortright to join us. It has its interesting side, this--a
transplanted Englishman married to a country girl introducing old
bred-in-the-bone New Yorkers to New Manhattan."

When I go to town my costuming consists merely in change of waists, as