We Three | Page 3

to subject, from character to character, from plot to counterplot, and crosswise and back again. If more autobiographists realized how many difficulties may be avoided in this way, far fewer autobiographists would be heroes and many, many more would be butterflies.

II
Even before I was born the richer people of New York did not inhabit that city the year round, but their holiday excursions were far shorter than now, both in distance and duration. To escape the intenser heats of summer the moneyed citizen of those days sent his family to the seaside for six weeks or to the mountains. Later his family began to insist that it must also be spared the seasons of intense cold. And nowadays there are families (and the number of these increases by leaps and bounds) who if they are not allowed to escape from everything which seems to them disagreeable or difficult, get very down in the mouth about it. Even the laboring classes are affected. The rich man wishes to live without any discomfort whatever, and the poor man wishes to live without doing any work whatever. That, I think, is at the root of their most bloody differences of opinion, for the poor man thinks that the rich man ought to be uncomfortable, and the rich man thinks that the poor man ought to work. And they will never be in agreement.
Given enough money it becomes easier and easier to run from one difficulty or discomfort into another. And even the laborer finds it continually easier to make a living without earning it.
When I was a little boy, Newport and Bar Harbor were a long way from New York. To Europe was a real voyage; while such places as Palm Beach and Aiken were never mentioned in polite society, for the simple reason that polite society had never heard of them. But nowadays it is not uncommon for a man to have visited all these places (and some of them more than once) in the course of a year. Europe which was once a foreign country is now but as a suburb of New York. And I myself, I am happy to say, have been far oftener in Paris than in Brooklyn.
The modern butterfly thinks little of flying out to Pittsburg or Cleveland or St. Louis for a dance or a mere wedding. He attends athletic events thousands of miles apart, and knows his way from the front door to the bar and card room of every important club between the Jockey Club in Paris and the Pacific Union in San Francisco, excepting, of course, those clubs in his own city to which he does not happen to belong.
My father, because of my little sister's fragility, was one of the first men I know to make a practice of going South for the winter, and to Long Island for the spring and autumn. In summer we went to Europe or Bar Harbor, for with justice he preferred the climate of the latter to that of Newport or Southampton. We were less and less in our town house, and indeed so jumped about from place to place, that although my mother succeeded in making her other houses easy and indeed charming to live in, I have never known what it was to have a home. And indeed I cannot at this moment call to mind a single New York family of the upper class that lives in a home.
My mother is old-fashioned. She would have preferred to live in one place the year around, to beautify and to ennoble that place; to be buried from it as she had been married into it, and to leave upon it the stamp of her character, incessant industry and good taste; to fill it gradually with the things she loved best or admired most, and to be always there, ready for the children or the grandchildren to come home.
But she gave up this ambition at a hint of delicacy in a child's face, and a note of anxiety in a husband's voice, and took to packing trunks to go somewhere, and unpacking them when they arrived. Of course she couldn't do this to all of them, for we moved with very many, but there were certain ones to which she would let nobody put hand but herself--my father's, my sister's, mine, and her own. And you always knew that if you had accidentally left letters and notes in your pockets that you didn't want seen, they wouldn't be.
My father would almost abuse her for doing so much work with her own hands, and for always being up so early, but in secret he was very proud of her; and to see her dressed for the dance or the opera, eager and gay as a girl, slender