use is better made by his neighbors. This philosophical
utterance occurs in one of those black-letter volumes which I purchased
with the money left me by my Aunt Susan (of blessed memory!). Even if
Alice and I had not fully made up our minds, after nineteen years of
planning and figuring, what kind of a house we wanted, we could have
referred the important matter to our neighbors in the confident
assurance that these amiable folk were much more intimately acquainted
with our needs and our desires than we ourselves were. The utter
disinterestedness of a neighbor qualifies him to judge dispassionately
of your requirements. When he tells you that you ought to do so and so
or ought to have such and such a thing, his counsel should be heeded,
because the probabilities are that he has made a careful study of you
and he has unselfishly arrived at conclusions which intelligently
contemplate your welfare. In planning for oneself one is too likely to
be directed by narrow prejudices and selfish considerations.

Alice and I have always thought much of our neighbors. I suspect that
my neighbors are my most salient weaknesses. I confess that I enjoy
nothing else more than an informal call upon the Baylors, the Tiltmans,
the Rushes, the Denslows and the other good people who constitute the
best element in society in that part of the city where Alice and I and
our interesting family have been living in rented quarters for the last
six years. This informality of which I am so fond has often grieved
and offended Alice. It is that gentle lady's opinion that a man at my
time of life should have too much dignity to make a practice of
"bolting into people's houses" (I quote her words exactly) when I know
as well as I know anything that they are at dinner, and that a dessert
in the shape of a rhubarb pie or a Strawberry shortcake is about to be
served.

There was a time when Alice overlooked this idiosyncrasy upon my part;
that was before I achieved what Alice terms a national reputation by my
discovery of a satellite to the star Gamma in the tail of the
constellation Leo. Alice does not stop to consider that our neighbors
have never read the royal octavo volume I wrote upon the subject of
that discovery; Alice herself has never read that book. Alice simply
knows that I wrote that book and paid a printer one thousand one
hundred dollars to print it; this is sufficient to give me a high and
broad status in her opinion, bless her l