I missed the summers with them when, somewhat later, at boarding-school and college, the children spent much of their vacations with friends.  Gradually I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter, though I wrote them at stated intervals.  But when Halsey had finished his electrical course and Gertrude her boarding-school, and both came home to stay, things were suddenly changed.  The winter Gertrude came out was nothing but a succession of sitting up late at night to bring her home from things, taking her to the dressmakers between naps the next day, and discouraging ineligible youths with either more money than brains, or more brains than money.  Also, I acquired a great many things:  to say lingerie for under-garments, “frocks” and “gowns” instead of dresses, and that beardless sophomores are not college boys, but college men.  Halsey required less personal supervision, and as they both got their mother’s fortune that winter, my responsibility became purely moral.  Halsey bought a car, of course, and I learned how to tie over my bonnet a gray baize veil, and, after a time, never to stop to look at the dogs one has run down.  People are apt to be so unpleasant about their dogs.

The additions to my education made me a properly equipped maiden aunt, and by spring I was quite tractable.  So when Halsey suggested camping in the Adirondacks and Gertrude wanted Bar Harbor, we compromised on a good country house with links near, within motor distance of town and telephone distance of the doctor.  That was how we went to Sunnyside.

We went out to inspect the property, and it seemed to deserve its name.  Its cheerful appearance gave no indication whatever of anything out of the ordinary.  Only one thing seemed unusual to me:  the housekeeper, who had been left in charge, had moved from the house to the gardener’s lodge, a few days before.  As the lodge was far enough away from the house, it seemed to me that either fire or thieves could complete their work of destruction undisturbed.  The property was an extensive one:  the house on the top of a hill, which sloped away in great stretches of green lawn and clipped hedges, to the road; and across the valley, perhaps a couple of miles away, was the Greenwood Club House.  Gertrude and Halsey were infatuated.

“Why, it’s everything you want,” Halsey said “View, air, good water and good roads.  As for the house, it’s big enough for a hospital, if it has a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne back,” which was ridiculous:  it was pure Elizabethan.

Of course we took the place; it was not my idea of comfort, being much too large and sufficiently isolated to make the servant question serious.  But I give myself credit for this:  whatever has happened since, I never blamed Halsey and Gertrude for taking me there.  And another thing:  if the series of catastrophes there did nothing else, it taught me one thing—­that somehow, somewhere, from