KATE LANGLEY BOSHER

 People like that.  Illustrated.  Post 8vo
 how it happened. Frontispiece.  Post 8vo
 the house of happiness.  Frontispiece.  Post 8vo
 Mary Cary.  Frontispiece.  Post 8vo
 miss GIBBIE Gault.  Frontispiece.  Post 8vo
 the man in lonely land.  Frontispiece.  Post 8vo

TO

LUCY BOSHER JANNEY

CHAPTER I

One of the advantages of being an unrequired person of twenty-six, with an income sufficient for necessities, is the right of choice as to a home locality.  I am that sort of person, and, having exercised said right, I am now living in Scarborough Square.

To my friends and relatives it is amazing, inexplicable, and beyond understanding that I should wish to live here.  I do not try to make them understand; and therein lies grievance against me.  Because of my failure to explain what they are pleased to call a peculiar decision on my part, I am at present the subject of heated criticism.  It will soon stop.  What a person does or doesn’t do is of little importance to more than three or four people.  By Christmas my foolishness will have ceased to cause comment, ceased to interest those to whom it doesn’t matter really where or how I live.

I like living in Scarborough Square very much.  After many years spent in the homes of others I am now the head of half a house, the whole of which is mine; and even though it is situated on the last square of respectability in a part of the town long forgotten by the descendants of its former residents, I am filled with a sense of proprietorship that is warm and comforting, and already I have learned to love it—­this nice, old-fashioned house in which I live.

Until very recently Scarborough Square was only a name.  There had been no reason to visit it, and had I ventured to it I would have seen little save a tiny park bounded on four sides by houses of shabby gentility, for the most part detached, and of a style of architecture long since surrendered to more undesirable designs.  The park is but an open space whose straggly trees and stunted shrubs and dusty grass add dejection to the atmosphere of shrinking respectability which the neighborhood still makes effort to maintain; but that, too, I have learned to love, for I see in it that which I never noticed in the large and handsome parks up-town.

As a place of residence this section of the city I am just beginning to know has become very interesting to me.  No one of importance lives near it, and the occupants of its houses, realizing their social submergence and pecuniary impotence, have too long existed in the protection of obscurity to venture into the publicity which civic attention necessitates, and on first acquaintance it is not attractive.  I agree with my friends in that.  I did not come here because I thought it was an attractive place in which to live.