To be sure, every one who has met
Horace, not only fails to find anything objectionable about him, but
accords him great powers of attraction; yet they declare in the same
breath that the affair will not do for a precedent, and deplore its
radical influence.
To-day we have settled down to midsummer quiet and to a period of silence
after much talking. The Bluffs are quite deserted except by a bevy of
children left with governesses while their parents are yachting or in
Europe, and the servants in charge of the various houses. But a trail of
discontent is left behind, for these servants, by their conspicuous
idleness, are having a very demoralizing effect upon the help in the
plain houses hereabout, who are necessarily expected to do more work for
lower wages.
I am fully realizing, also, that the excitement of living other people's
lives, which we cannot control, through sympathetic imagination, is even
more wearing than meeting one's own responsibilities. A certain amount of
separateness--I use the word in an entirely opposite meaning to that of
aloofness--is, I find, necessary to every member of our household, and
this chance for intimacy with oneself is a luxury denied to those who
live all their lives taking joy and sorrow equally in a crowd.
Even the boys, young as they are, recognize it unconsciously, and have
separate tree lairs, and neither may enter the other's, without going
through some mysterious and wonderful ceremony and sign language, by
which permission is asked and granted.
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