d air. But its elephantine woodwork repelled
her, for she had grown up amid the rococo exuberances of Paris
apartments. The heavy honesty of black-walnut depressed her after the
gilded stucco of her mother's salon. And that huge, portentous
orchestrion took up such an immensity of room!

I doubt if the neighborhood itself pleased her much better, though it
was homogeneous (in its way), and dignified, and enjoyed an exceptional
measure of quietude. Perhaps it was too quiet, after some years of a
balcony on a boulevard. And it is true that some of the big houses were
vacant, and that some of the families roundabout went away too often and
stayed away too long. An empty house is a dead house, and when doors and
windows are boarded up you may say the dead house is laid out. Things
were sometimes _triste_--the French for final condemnation. The exodus
so long foreshadowed seemed appreciably under way. This Gertrude became
increasingly conscious, as the months went on, that most of the people
she wanted to see and most of the houses she was prompted to frequent
were miles away, and that the flood-tide of business rolled between.

Of her reaction to the circle in which she first found herself I have
given you one or two indications. It would be easy, as it would be
customary, to give some other of her early social experiences in detail
and her reactions to them; but my interest is frankly in her husband and
in his reactions. It was of him, too, that I saw the most; and I have
never gone greatly into society.

At the end of a long and possibly somewhat dull winter his wife began to
hint the advantageousness of transferring themselves to that other part
of town. Raymond was not precisely in the position where he cared to pay
high rent for a small house, while a big house was standing empty and
unrealizable. Pouts; frowns.... But nature came to his aid. With a new
young life soon to appear above the horizon, now was no time to shift.
His son should be born in the house in which he ought to be born. A
reasonable view, on the whole; and it prevailed.

Raymond had said "son," and son it was. The baby was not named Raymond:
his father, however much of an egoist, was not willing to put himself
forward as such so obviously, nor for a period that promised to be
indefinitely long. Nor was the baby called Bartholomew, after his
maternal grandfather in the East: for who cared to inflict such an
old-fashioned, four-syllable name on such