piece of easy and enticing
mischief, and play the man.

And you, mother, with your face of a saint, haven't I always poked fun
at you? You don't look more than middle-aged either. You look less.
And yet you too have your sorrow that never dies. For you were fitted
to be a mother of men, and you have brought into the world only a
lovely flower that soon withered away, and a Butterfly.

I don't call myself a Butterfly from choice. I only do it because I'm
trying to be honest, and I think that it's just about what I am. But
do we really know what a butterfly is? Have we given that ornamental
(though I say it--that shouldn't) and light-minded (though I say it
with shame) and light-hearted (though the very lightest of hearts must
weigh _something_, you know) insect a square deal? I confess that only
a light-hearted insect would perpetrate such a sentence as the
foregoing; but wouldn't it be fun if, when the whole truth comes to be
known about butterflies, we found them more or less self-respecting,
more or less monogamous, occasionally ratiocinative, carelessly kind,
rather than light-hearted creatures, and not insects, in the accepted
sense, at all? It would surprise me no more to learn that an insect
was really a man, than that a man, even so great and thinking a man as
Mr. Bryan for example, was an insect.

If the butterfly at lunch flits from flower to flower; and the
butterfly at play flits from butterfly to butterfly; so then may the
butterfly (at what he is pleased to call his work) flit from theme to
theme, from subject to subject, from character to character, from plot
to counterplot, and crosswise and back again. If more autobiographists
realized how many difficulties may be avoided in this way, far fewer
autobiographists would be heroes and many, many more would be
butterflies.

II

Even before I was born the richer people of New York did not inhabit
that city the year round, but their holiday excursions were far shorter
than now, both in distance and duration. To escape the intenser heats
of summer the moneyed citizen of those days sent his family to the
seaside for six weeks or to the mountains. Later his family began to
insist that it must also be spared the seasons of intense cold. And
nowadays there are families (and the number of these increases by leaps
and bounds) who if they are not allowed to escape from everything which
seems to them disagreeable or difficult, get very down in th