; and in the second
place, because it _is_ New York. There is too much of everything
here--too much money, too much show, too many lamps, and
sofa-pillows, and courses at dinner. Then everybody seems to be
everlastingly at work getting ready to live. Here is Winifred, for
instance, tearing up and down for hours after upholsterers and
paper-hangers, toiling about from shop to shop, and from Broadway to
Sixth Avenue, matching samples and trying aesthetic effects which no
one but herself cares anything for when they are accomplished. And by
the end of the day she is so tired that she falls asleep when I read
aloud to her in the evening.

"Why do you fuss so about everything?" I asked her the other day. "We
don't fuss in Boston."

"That accounts," she answered,--which was not very civil, I
thought. She has certainly grown very queer this fall. She told me
this morning that she thought the Unitarians were as bigoted as
anybody. Now she never would have said a thing like that this summer
when she was living in the open air. It's my opinion that two things
are telling upon her,--furnace heat and the influence of that Mr.
Flint--especially the last. Why, it just seems to me as if she were
trying to make herself over into the kind of woman he would be likely
to like. She has dropped her old hoidenish ways and goes about as prim
as a Puritan. She says she is always like that in the city, and that
her Nepaug ways are only a reaction; but I don't believe it. He comes
here a great deal, that is certain; and I don't think it is very
gentlemanly, after her begging him, as I heard her with my own ears,
to go away. But he is too selfish to care what any one wants but
himself. For some reason or other it suits his plans just now to try
to please Winifred.

The first night I was here Winifred was telling him about Maria
Polonati, the little Italian girl who sells flowers at the corner of
the Square, and how she had made friends with her, and learned all
about her "padre" and her "madre" and the playmates she had left
behind her in the "bella Napoli." Winifred knows how to tell a thing
so it seems to stand right out like the old Dutch women in the
pictures, and I could see that Mr. Flint was taking it all in, for all
he said so little; and so he was, for the next time he came he walked
right up to Winifred's chair and dropped a great bunch of violets into
her lap.

"The little girl at the corner sent you these," he said; and Winifred