“The middle-aged French women who now, as always, hold their own in public life have better tact, and make the cultivation of some intellectual quality or political scheme at least the excuse for holding their salons, and not the mere excuse of rivalry in money spending.

“I find the very vocabulary altered—­for rest read change, for sleep read stimulation, etc, ad infin.

“Born a clergyman’s daughter of the old regime, I was always obliged to be more conservative than was really natural to my temperament; even so, I find myself at middle life with comfortable means (owing to that bit of rock and mud of grandma’s on the old Bloomingdale road that father persistently kept through thick and thin), either obliged to compromise myself, alter my dress and habits, go to luncheons where the prelude is a cocktail, and the after entertainment to play cards for money, contract bronchitis by buzzing at afternoon teas, make a vocation of charity, or—­stay by myself,—­these being the only forms of amusement left open, and none offering the intimate form of social intercourse I need.

“I did mission schools and parish visiting pretty thoroughly and conscientiously during forty years of my life,—­on my return an ecclesiastical, also, as well as a social shock awaited me.  St. Jacob’s has been made a free church, and my special department has been given in charge of two newly adopted Deaconesses, ’both for the betterment of parish work and reaching of the poor.’  So be it, but Heaven help those who are neither rich nor poor enough to be of consequence and yet are spiritually hungry.

“The church system is necessarily reduced to mathematics.  The rector has office hours, so have the curates, and they will ’cheerfully come in response to any call.’  It was pleasant to have one’s pastor drop in now and then in a sympathetic sort of way, pleasant to have a chance to ask his advice without formally sending for him as if you wished to be prayed over!  But everything has grown so big and mechanical that there is not time.  The clergy in many high places are emancipating themselves from the Bible and preaching politics, history, fiction, local sensation, and what not, or lauding in print the moral qualities of a drama in which the friendship between Mary Magdalene and Judas Iscariot is dwelt on and the latter adjudged a patriot.  I don’t like it, and I don’t like hurrying to church that I may secure my seat in the corner of our once family pew, where as a child I loved to think that the light that shone across my face from a particular star in one of the stained-glass windows was a special message to me.  It all hurts, and I do not deny that I am bitter.  Those in charge of gathering in new souls should take heed how they ignore or trample on the old crop!