Our nursery was a model of dainty comfort.  All the superficial elegancies were provided for.  It was a sunny, dustless apartment, with snow-white muslins, white enamel, and a frieze of grotesque Noah’s Ark animals perambulating round the wall.  There were huge dolls’ houses, with electric lights; big closets of toys.  From the earliest moment possible these three infants began to have private lessons in everything, including drawing, music and German.  Their little days were as crowded with engagements then as now.  Every hour was provided for; but among these multifarious occupations there was no engagement with their parents.

Even if their mother had not been overwhelmed with social duties herself my babies would, I am confident, have had no time for their parent except at serious inconvenience and a tremendous sacrifice of time.  To be sure, I used occasionally to watch them decorously eating their strictly supervised suppers in the presence of the governess; but the perfect arrangements made possible by my financial success rendered parents a superfluity.  They never bumped their heads, or soiled their clothes, or dirtied their little faces—­so far as I knew.  They never cried—­at least I was never permitted to hear them.

When the time came for them to go to bed each raised a rosy little cheek and said sweetly:  “Good night, papa.”  They had, I think, the usual children’s diseases—­exactly which ones I am not sure of; but they had them in the hospital room at the top of the house, from which I was excluded, and the diseases progressed with medical propriety in due course and under the efficient management of starchy trained nurses.

Their outdoor life consisted in walking the asphalt pavements of Central Park, varied with occasional visits to the roller-skating rink; but their social life began at the age of four or five.  I remember these functions vividly, because they were so different from those of my own childhood.  The first of these was when my eldest daughter attained the age of six years.  Similar events in my private history had been characterized by violent games of blind man’s buff, hide and seek, hunt the slipper, going to Jerusalem, ring-round-a-rosy, and so on, followed by a dish of ice-cream and hairpulling.

Not so with my offspring.  Ten little ladies and gentlemen, accompanied by their maids, having been rearranged in the dressing room downstairs, were received by my daughter with due form in the drawing room.  They were all flounced, ruffled and beribboned.  Two little boys of seven had on Eton suits.  Their behavior was impeccable.

Almost immediately a professor of legerdemain made his appearance and, with the customary facility of his brotherhood, proceeded to remove tons of debris from presumably empty hats, rabbits from handkerchiefs, and hard-boiled eggs from childish noses and ears.  The assembled group watched him with polite tolerance.  At intervals there was a squeal of surprise, but it soon developed that most of them had already seen the same trickman half a dozen times.  However, they kindly consented to be amused, and the professor gave way to a Punch and Judy show of a sublimated variety, which the youthful audience viewed with mild approval.