of news I will write you as faithfully as
I have done ever since I came here on your service under pretence
of fighting gout which, Heaven be praised, has never yet waylaid
me!--_unberufen_!"

"So, to continue: the faithful three, Messieurs Classon, Cuyp,
and Vetchen, do valiantly escort me on my mountain rides and
drives. They are dears, all three, Garry, and it does not become
you to shrug your shoulders. When I go to Palm Beach in January
they, as usual, are going too. I don't know what I should do
without them, Virginia having decided to remain in Europe this
winter.

"Yes, to answer your question, Mr. Wayward expects to cruise as
far South as Palm Beach in January. I happen to have a note from
him here on my desk in which he asks me whether he may invite you
to go with him. Isn't it a tactful way of finding out whether you
would care to be at Palm Beach this winter?

"So I shall write him that I think you would like to be asked.
Because, Garry, I do believe that it is all turning out
naturally, inevitably, as it was meant to turn out from the
first, and that, some time this winter, there can be no reason
why you should not see Shiela again.

"I know this, that Mr. Cardross is very fond of you--that Mrs.
Cardross is also--that every member of that most wholesome family
cares a great deal about you.

"As for their not being very fashionable people, their amiable
freedom from social pretension, their very simple origin--all
that, in their case, affects me not at all--where any happiness
of yours is concerned.

"I _do_ like old-time folk, and lineage smacking of New
Amsterdam; but even my harmless snobbishness is now so completely
out of fashion that nobody cares. You are modern enough to laugh
at it; I am not; and I still continue faithful to my Classons and
Cuyps and Vetchens and Suydams; and to all that they stand for in
Manhattan--the rusty vestiges of by-gone pomp and fussy
circumstance--the memories that cling to the early lords of the
manors, the old Patroons, and titled refugees--all this I still
cling to--even to their shabbiness and stupidity and bad manners.

"Don't be too bitter in your amusement, for after all, you are
kin to us; don't be too severe on us; for we are passing, Garry,
the descendants of Patroon and refugee alike--the Cuyps, the
Classons, the Van Diemans, the Vetch