first "exclusive younger set" have moved out too, and formed the
nucleus of a neighborhood group that has wonderful times on incomes
no one of which touches $4000 a year.

Ours is not as much as that yet; but it is enough to leave a wide
and comfortable margin all around our wants. Max has given up his
pipe for cigarettes (unmonogramed), and patronizes a good tailor for
business reasons. But in everything else our substitutions stand:
gardening for golf; picnics for roadhouse dinners; simple food,
simple clothing, simple hospitality, books, a fire, and a game of
chess on winter nights.

We don't even talk about economies any more. We like them.
But--every Christmas there comes to me via the Christmas tree a box
of stockings, and for Max a box of socks--heavy silk. There never is
any card in either box; but I think we'll probably get them till we
die.

The following short confession, signed "Mrs. M.F.E.," was awarded the
first prize by the _American Magazine_ in a contest for articles on "The
Best Thing Experience Has Taught Me":

Forty Years Bartered for What?

A tiny bit of wisdom, but as vital as protoplasm. I know, for I
bartered forty precious years of wifehood and motherhood to learn
it.

During the years of my childhood and girlhood, our family passed
from wealth to poverty. My father and only brother were killed in
battle during the Civil War; our slaves were freed; our plantations
melted from my mother's white hands during the Reconstruction days;
our big town house was sold for taxes.

When I married, my only dowry was a fierce pride and an overwhelming
ambition to get back our material prosperity. My husband was making
a "good living." He was kind, easy-going, with a rare capacity for
enjoying life and he loved his wife with that chivalrous,
unquestioning, "the queen-can-do-no-wrong" type of love.

But even in our days of courting I answered his ardent love-making
with, "And we will work and save and buy back the big house; then we
will--" etc., etc.

And he? Ah, alone at sixty, I can still hear echoing down the years
his big tender laugh, as he'd say, "Oh, what a de-ah, ambitious
little sweetheart I have!"

He owned a home, a little cottage with a rose garden at one side of
it--surely, with love, enough for any bride. But I--I saw only the
ancest