LOOKING UP BROAD STREET FROM SPRUCE STREET

OUR PHILADELPHIA

DESCRIBED BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
ILLUSTRATED WITH ONE HUNDRED & FIVE
LITHOGRAPHS BY JOSEPH PENNELL

PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
MCMXIV

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1914

PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A.

PREFACE

To-day, when it is the American born in the Ghetto, or Syria, or some other remote part of the earth, whose recollections are prized, it may seem as if the following pages called for an apology. I have none to make. They were written simply for the pleasure of gathering together my old memories of a town that, as my native place, is dear to me and my new impressions of it after an absence of a quarter of a century. But now I have finished I add to this pleasure in my book the pleasant belief that it will have its value for others, if only for two reasons. In the first place, J.'s drawings which illustrate it are his record of the old Philadelphia that has passed and the new Philadelphia that is passing—a record that in a few years it will be impossible for anybody to make, so continually is Philadelphia changing. In the second, my story of Philadelphia, perfect or imperfect, may in as short a time be equally impossible for anybody to repeat, since I am one of those old-fashioned Americans, American by birth with many generations of American fore-fathers, who are rapidly becoming rare creatures among the hordes of new-fashioned Americans who were anything and everything else no longer than a year or a week or an hour ago.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell

3 Adelphi Terrace House, London
May, 1914

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

OUR PHILADELPHIA

CHAPTER I: AN EXPLANATION

I

I think I have a right to call myself a Philadelphian, though I am not sure if Philadelphia is of the same opinion. I was born in Philadelphia, as my Father was before me, but my ancestors, having had the sense to emigrate to America in time to make me as American as an American can be, were then so inconsiderate as to waste a couple of centuries in Virginia and Maryland, and my Grandfather was the first of the family to settle in a town where it is important, if you belong at all, to have belonged from the beginning. However, J.'s ancestors, with greater wisdom, became at the earliest available moment not only Philadelphians, but Philadelphia Friends, and how very much more that means Philadelphians know without my telling them. And so, as he does belong from the beginning and as I would have belonged had I had my choice, for I would rather be a Philadelphian than any other sort of American. I do not see why I cannot call myself one despite the blunder of my forefathers in so long calling themselves something else.

I might hope that my affection alone for Philadelphia would give me the right, were I not Philadelphian enough to know that Philadelphia is, as it always was and always will be, cheerfully indifferent to whatever love its citizens may have to offer it. I can hardly suppose my claim for gratitude greater than that of its Founder or the long succession of Philadelphians between his time and mine who have loved it and been snubbed or bullied in return. Indeed, in the face of this Philadelphia indifference, my affection seems so superfluous that I often wonder why it should be so strong. But wise or foolish, there it is, strengthening with the years whether I will or no,—a deeper rooted sentiment than I thought I was capable of for the town with which the happiest memories of my childhood are associated, where the first irresponsible days of my youth were spent, which never ceased to be home to me during the more than a quarter of a century I lived away from it.

DELANCEY PLACE

Besides, Philadelphia attracts me apart from what it may stand for in memory or from the charm sentiment may lend to it. I love its beauty—the beauty of tranquil streets, of red brick houses with white marble steps, of pleasant green shade, of that peaceful look of the past Philadelphians cross the ocean to rave over in the little old dead towns of England and Holland—a beauty that is now fast disappearing. I love its character—the calm, the dignity, the reticence with which it has kept up through the centuries with the American pace, the airs of a demure country village with which it has done the work and earned the money of a big bustling town, the cloistered seclusion with which it enjoys its luxury and hides its palaces behind its plain brick fronts—a character that also is fast going. I love its history, though I am no historian, for the little I know colours its beauty and accounts for its character.

II

It is not for nothing that I begin with this flourish of my birth certificate and public confession of love. I want to establish my right, first, to call myself a Philadelphian, and then, to talk about Philadelphia as freely as we only can talk about the places and the people and the things we belong to and care for. I would not dare to take such a liberty with Philadelphia if my references were not in order, for, as a Philadelphian, I appreciate the risk. Not that I have any idea of writing the history of Philadelphia. I hope I have the horror, said to be peculiar to all generous minds, of what are commonly called facts, and also the intelligence not to attempt what I know I cannot do. Another good reason is that the history has already been written more than once. Philadelphians, almost from their cave-dwelling period, have seemed conscious of the eye of posterity upon them. They had hardly landed on the banks of the Delaware before they began to write alarmingly long letters which they preserved, and elaborate diaries which they kept with equal care. And the letter-writing, diary-keeping fever was so in the air that strangers in the town caught it: from Richard Castleman to John Adams, from John Adams to Charles Dickens, from Charles Dickens to Henry James, every visitor, with writing for profession or amusement, has had more or less to say about it—usually more. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has gathered the old material together; our indispensable antiquary, John Watson, has gleaned the odds and ends left by the way; and no end of modern writers in Philadelphia have ransacked their stores of information: Dr. Weir Mitchell making novels out of them, Mr. Sydney Fisher and Miss Agnes Repplier, history; Mr. Hampton Carson using them as the basis of further research; Miss Anne Hollingsworth Wharton resurrecting Colonial life and society and fashions from them, Mr. Eberlein and Mr. Lippincott, the genealogy of Colonial houses; other patriotic citizens helping themselves in one way or another; until, among them all, they have filled a large library and prepared a sufficiently formidable task for the historian of Philadelphia in generations to come without my adding to his burden.

III

It is an amusing library, as Philadelphians may believe now they are getting over the bad habit into which they had fallen of belittling their town, much in their town's fashion of belittling them. I am afraid it was partly their fault if the rest of America fell into the same habit. As I recall my old feelings and attitude, it seems to me that in my day we must have been brought up to look down upon Philadelphia. The town surely cut a poor figure in my school books, and the purplest patches in Colonial history must have been there reserved for New England or New York, Virginia or the Carolinas, for any and every colony rather than the Province of Pennsylvania, or I would not have left school better posted in the legends of Powhatan and Pocahontas than in the life of William Penn, and more edified by the burning of witches and the tracking of Indians than by the struggles of Friends to give every man the liberty to go to Heaven his own way. The amiable contempt in which Philadelphians held William Penn revealed itself in their free-and-easy way of speaking of him, if they spoke of him at all, as Billy Penn, though Penn would have been the last to invite the familiarity. Probably few outside the Society of Friends could have said just what he had done for their town, or just what they owed to him. If I am not mistaken, the prevailing idea was that his chief greatness consisted in the cleverness with which he fooled the land out of the Indians for a handful of beads.

"PORTICO ROW" SPRUCE STREET

The present generation could not be so ignorant if it wanted to. The statue of Penn, in full-skirted coat and broad-brimmed hat, dominating Philadelphia from the ugly tower of the Public Buildings, though it may not be a thing of beauty, at least suggests to Philadelphians that it would not have been put up there, the most conspicuous landmark from the streets and the surrounding country, if Penn had not been somebody, or done something, of some consequence. As for the rest of America, I doubt if it often comes so near to Philadelphia that it can see the statue. The last time I went to New York from London I met on the steamer a man from Michigan who had obviously been but a short time before a man from Cork, and who was so keen to stop in Philadelphia on his way West that I might have been astonished had I not heard so much of the miraculously rapid Americanization of the modern emigrant. Most people do not want to stop in Philadelphia unless they have business there, and he had none, and naturally I could not imagine any other motive except the desire to see the town which is of the greatest historic importance in the United States and which still possesses proofs of it. But the man from Michigan gave me to understand, and pretty quick too, that he did not know Philadelphia had a history and old buildings to prove it, and what was more, he did not care if it had. He guessed history wasn't in his line. What he wanted was to take the next train to Atlantic City; folks he knew had been there and said it was great. And I rather think this is the way most Americans, from America or from Cork, feel about Philadelphia.

IV

It is not my affair to enlighten them or anybody else. I have a more personal object in view. Philadelphia may mean to other people nothing at all—that is their loss; I am concerned entirely with what it means to me. In those wonderful Eighteen-Nineties, now written about with awe by the younger generation as if no less prehistoric than the period of the Renaissance, until it makes me feel a new Methusaleh to own that I lived and worked through them, we were always being told that art should be the artist's record of nature seen through a temperament, criticism the critic's story of his adventures among the world's masterpieces, and though I am neither artist nor critic, though I am not sure what a temperament is, much less if I have one, still I fancy this expresses in a way the end I have set myself in writing about Philadelphia. For I should like, if I can, to record my personal impressions of the town I love and to give my adventures among the beautiful things, the humorous things, the tragic things it contains in more than ample measure. My interest is in my personal experiences, but these have been coloured by the history of Philadelphia since I have dabbled in it, and have become richer and more amusing. I have learned, with age and reading and travelling, that Philadelphia as it is cannot really be known without some knowledge of Philadelphia as it was: also that Philadelphia, both as it is and as it was, is worth knowing. Americans will wander to the ends of the earth to study the psychology—as they call it of people they never could understand however hard they tried; they will shut themselves up in a remote town of Italy or Spain to master the secrets of its prehistoric past; they will squander months in the Bibliothèque Nationale or the British Museum to get at the true atmosphere of Paris or London; when, had they only stopped their journey at Broad Street Station in Philadelphia or, if they were Philadelphians, never taken the train out of it, they could have had all the psychology and secrets and atmosphere they could ask for, with much less trouble and expense.

I have never been to any town anywhere, and I have been to many in my time, that has more decided character than Philadelphia, or to any where this character is more difficult to understand if the clue is not got from the past. For instance, people talk about Philadelphia as if its one talent was for sleep, while the truth is, taking the sum of its achievements, no other American town has done so much hard work, no other has accomplished so much for the country. Impressed as we are by the fact, it would be impossible to account for the reputation if it were not known that the people who made Philadelphia presented the same puzzling contradiction in their own lives—the only people who ever understood how to be in the world and not of it.

ARCH STREET MEETING HOUSE

The usual alternative to not being of the world is to be in a cloister or to live like a hermit, to accept a role in common or to renounce social intercourse. But the Friends did not have to shut themselves up to conquer worldliness, they did not have to renounce the world's work and its rewards. For "affluence of the world's goods," Isaac Norris, writing from Philadelphia, could felicitate Jonathan Dickinson, "knowing both thyself and dear wife have hearts and souls fit to use them." That was better than shirking temptation in a monk's cell or a philosopher's tub. If George Fox wore a leather suit, it was because he found it convenient, but William Penn, for whom it would have been highly inconvenient, had no scruple in dressing like other men of his position and wearing the blue ribbon of office. Nor because religion was freed from all unessential ornament, was the house stripped of comfort and luxury. I write about Friends with hesitation. I have been married to one now for many years and can realize the better therefore that none save Friends can write of themselves with authority. But I hope I am right in thinking, as I always have thought since I read Thomas Elwood's Memoirs, that their attitude is excellently explained in his account of his first visit to the Penningtons "after they were become Quakers" when, though he was astonished at the new gravity of their look and behaviour, he found Guli Springett amusing herself in the garden and the dinner "handsome." For the world's goods never being the end they were to the World's People, Friends were as undisturbed by their possession as by their absence and, as a consequence, could meet and accept life, whether its gifts were wealth and power or poverty and obscurity, with the serenity few other men have found outside the cloister. Moreover, they could speak the truth, calling a spade a spade, or their enemy the scabbed sheep, or smooth silly man, or vile fellow, or inhuman monster, or villain infecting the air with a hellish stench, he no doubt was, and never for a moment lose their tempers. This serenity—this "still strength"—is as the poles apart from the phlegmatic, constitutional slowness of the Dutch in New York or, on the other hand, from the tranquillity Henry James traces in progressive descent from taste, tradition, and history, even from the philosopher's calm of achieved indifference, and Friends, having carried it to perfection in their own conduct, left it as a legacy to their town.

THE SCHUYLKILL SOUTH FROM CALLOWHILL STREET

The usual American town, when it hustles, lets nobody overlook the fact that it is hustling. But Philadelphia has done its work as calmly as the Friends have done theirs, never boasting of its prosperity, never shouting its success and riches from the house-top, and its dignified serenity has been mistaken for sleep. Whistler used to say that if the General does not tell the world he has won the battle, the world will never hear of it. The trouble with Philadelphia is that it has kept its triumph to itself. But we have got so far from the old Friends that no harm can be done if Philadelphians begin to interpret their town's serenity to a world capable of confusing it with drowsiness. If America is ready to forget, if for long Philadelphians were as ready, it is high time we should remember ourselves and remind America of the services Philadelphia has rendered to the country, and its good taste in rendering them with so little fuss that all the country has done in return is to laugh at Philadelphia as a back number.

V

Philadelphians have grown accustomed to the laugh. We have heard it since we were in our cradles. We are used to have other Americans come to our town and,—in the face of our factory chimneys smoking along the Schuylkill and our ship-building yards in full swing on the Delaware, and our locomotives pouring out over the world by I do not know how many thousands from the works in Broad Street, and our mills going at full pressure in the "Little England" of Kensington, in Frankford and Germantown,—in the face of our busy schools and hospitals and academies,—in the face of our stores and banks and charities,—that is, in the face of our industry, our learning, and our philanthropy that have given tips to the whole country,—see only our sleep-laden eyes and hear only our sluggish snores. We know the foolish stories they tell. We have heard many more times than we can count of the Bostonian who retires to Philadelphia for complete intellectual rest, and the New Yorker who when he has a day off comes to spend a week in Philadelphia, and the Philadelphian who goes to New York to eat the snails he cannot catch in his own back-yard. We have heard until we have it by heart that Philadelphia is a cemetery, and the road to it, the Road to Yesterday. We are so familiar with the venerable cliché that we can but wonder at its gift of eternal youth. Never was there a jest that wore so well with those who make it. The comic column is rarely complete without it, and it is forever cropping up where least expected. In the last American novel I opened Philadelphia was described as hanging on to the last strap of the last car to the sound of Gabriel's horn on Judgment Day; in the last American magazine story I read the Philadelphia heroine by her Philadelphia calm conquered the cowboys of the west, as Friends of old disarmed their judges in court. In the general Americanization of London, even the London papers have seized upon the slowness of Philadelphia as a joke for Londoners to roar at. Li Hung Chang couldn't visit Philadelphia without dozing through the ceremonies in his honour and noting the appropriateness of it in his diary. And so it goes on, the witticism to-day apparently as fresh as it was in the Stone Age from which it has come down to us.

FRIENDS' GRAVEYARD, GERMANTOWN

If Philadelphians laugh, that is another matter—every man has the right to laugh at himself. But we have outlived our old affectation of indifference to our town, I am not sure that we are not pushing our profession of pride in it too far to the other extreme. I remember the last time I was home I went to a public meeting called to talk about the world's waterways, and no Philadelphian present, from the Mayor down, could talk of anything but Philadelphia and its greatness. But whatever may be our pose now, or next year, or the year after, there is always beneath it a substantial layer of affection, for we cannot help knowing, if nobody else does, what Philadelphia is and what Philadelphia has done. Certainly, it is because I know that I, for one, would so much rather be the Philadelphian I am, and my ancestors were not, than any other sort of American, that, as I have grown older, my love for my town has surprised me by its depth, and makes my confession of it now seem half pleasure, half duty.

CHAPTER II: A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA

I

If I made my first friendships from my perambulator, or trundling my hoop and skipping my rope, in Rittenhouse Square, as every Philadelphian should, they were interrupted and broken so soon that I have no memory of them.

IN RITTENHOUSE SQUARE

It was my fate to be sent to boarding-school before I had time to lay in a store of the associations that are the common property of happier Philadelphians of my generation. I do not know if I was ever taken, as J. and other privileged children were, to the Pennsylvania Hospital on summer evenings to see William Penn step down from his pedestal when he heard the clock strike six, or to the Philadelphia Library to wait until Benjamin Franklin, hearing the same summons, left his high niche for a neighbouring saloon. I cannot recall the firemen's fights and the cries of negroes selling pop-corn and ice-cream through the streets that fill some Philadelphia reminiscences I have read. I cannot say if I ever went anywhere by the omnibus sleigh in winter, or to West Philadelphia by the stage at any time of the year. I never coasted down the hills of Germantown, I never skated on the Schuylkill. When my contemporaries compare notes of these and many more delightful things in the amazing, romantic, incredible Philadelphia they grew up in, it annoys me to find myself out of it all, sharing none of their recollections, save one and that the most trivial. For, from the vagueness of the remote past, no event emerges so clearly as the periodical visit of "Crazy Norah," a poor, harmless, half-witted wanderer, who wore a man's hat and top boots, with bits of ribbon scattered over her dress, and who, on her aimless rounds, drifted into all the Philadelphia kitchens to the fearful joy of the children; and my memory may be less of her personally than of much talk of her helped by her resemblance, or so I fancied, to a picture of Meg Merrilies in a collection of engravings of Walter Scott's heroines owned by an Uncle, and almost the first book I can remember.

II

But great as was my loss, I fancy my memories of old Philadelphia gain in vividness for being so few. One of the most vivid is of the interminable drive in the slow horse-car which was the longest part of the journey to and from my Convent school,—which is the longest part of any journey I ever made, not to be endured at the time but for the chanting over and over to myself of all the odds and ends of verse I had got by heart, from the dramas of Little Miss Muffett and Little Jack Horner to Poe's Bells and Tennyson's Lady of Shalott—but in memory a drive to be rejoiced in, for nothing could have been more characteristic of Philadelphia as it was then. The Convent was in Torresdale on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Pennsylvania Depot—Philadelphia had as yet no Stations and Terminals—was in the distant, unknown quarter of Frankford. I believe it is used as a freight station now and I have sometimes thought that, for sentiment's sake, I should like to make a pilgrimage to it over the once well-travelled road. But the modern trolley has deserted the straight course of the unadventurous horse-car of my day and I doubt if ever again I could find my way back. The old horse-car went, without turn or twist, along Third Street. I started from the corner of Spruce, having got as far as that by the slower, more infrequent Spruce Street car, and after I had passed the fine old houses where Philadelphians—not aliens—lived, a good part of the route lay through a busy business section. But there has stayed with me as my chief impression of the endless street a sense of eternal calm. No matter how much solid work was being done, no matter how many fortunes were being made and unmade, it was always placid on the surface, uneventful and unruffled. The car, jingling along in leisurely fashion, was the one sign of animation.

THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM THE GROUNDS

Or often, in spring and summer, I went by boat, from—so false is memory—I cannot say what wharf, up the Delaware. This was a pleasanter journey and every bit as leisurely and as characteristic in its way of Philadelphia life. For though I might catch the early afternoon boat, it was sure to be full of business men returning from their offices to their houses on the river. Philadelphians did not wait for the Main Line to be invented to settle in the suburbs. They have always had a fancy for the near country ever since Penn lived in state at Pennsbury, and Logan at Stenton; ever since Bartram planted his garden on the banks of the Schuylkill, and Arnold brought Peggy Shippen as his bride to Mount Pleasant; ever since all the Colonial country houses we are so proud of were built. I have the haziest memory of the places where the boat stopped between Philadelphia and Torresdale and of the people who got out there. But I cannot help remembering Torresdale for it was as prominent a stopping-place in my journey through youth as it is in the journey up the Delaware. The Convent was my home for years, and I had many friends in the houses down by the riverside and scattered over the near country. Their names are among the most familiar in my youthful recollections: the Macalisters, the Grants—one of my brothers named after the father—the Hopkins—another of my brothers marrying in the family—the Fishers, Keatings, Steadmans, Kings, Bories, Whelans. It was not often I could go or come without meeting somebody I knew on board. I am a cockney myself, I love the town, but I can understand that Philadelphians whose homes were in the country, especially if that country lay along the shores of the Delaware, liked to get back early enough to profit by it; that, busy and full of affairs as they might be, they not only liked but managed to, shows how far hustling was from the old Philadelphia scheme of things. Nowadays the motor brings the country into town and town into the country. But the miles between town and country were then lengthened into leagues by the leisurely boat and the leisurely horse-car which, as I look back, seem to set the pace of life in Philadelphia when I was young.

III

At first my holidays were spent mostly at the Convent. My Father, with the young widower's embarrassment when confronted by his motherless children, solved the problem the existence of my Sister and myself was to him by putting us where he knew we were safe and well out of his way. I do not blame him. What is a man to do when he finds himself with two little girls on his clumsy masculine hands? But the result was he had no house of his own to bring us to when the other girls hurried joyfully home at Christmas and Easter and for the long summer holiday. It hurt as I used to watch them walking briskly down the long path on the way to the station. And yet, I scored in the end, for Philadelphia was the more marvellous to me, visiting it rarely, than it could have been to children to whom it was an everyday affair.

"ELEVENTH AND SPRUCE"

For years my Grandfather's house was the scene of the occasional visit. He lived in Spruce Street above Eleventh—the typical Philadelphia Street, straight and narrow, on either side rows of red brick houses, each with white marble steps, white shutters below and green shutters above, and along the red brick pavement rows of trees which made Philadelphia the green country town of Penn's desire, but the Philadelphian's life a burden in the springtime before the coming of the sparrows. Philadelphia, as I think of it in the old days at the season when the leaves were growing green, is always heavy with the odour of the evil-smelling ailantus and full of measuring worms falling upon me from every tree. My fear of "Crazy Norah" is hardly less clear in my early memories than the terror these worms were to the dear fragile little Aunt who had cared for me in my first motherless years, and who still, during my holidays, kept a watchful eye on me to see that I put my "gums" on if I went out in the rain and that I had the money in my pocket to stop at Dexter's for a plate of ice-cream. I can recall as if it were yesterday, her shrieks one Easter Sunday when she came home from church and found a green horror on her new spring bonnet and another on her petticoat, and her miserable certainty all through the early Sunday dinner that many more were crawling over her somewhere. But, indeed, the Philadelphians of to-day can never know from what loathsome creatures the sparrows have delivered them.

My Grandfather's house was as typical as the street—one of the quite modest four-story brick houses that were thought unseemly sky-scrapers and fire-traps when they were first built in Philadelphia. I can never go by the old house of many memories—for sale, alas! the last time I passed and still for sale according to the last news to reach me even as I correct my proofs—without seeing myself as I used to be, arriving from the Convent, small, plain, unbecomingly dressed and conscious of it, with my pretty, always-becomingly-dressed because nothing was unbecoming to her, not-in-the-least-shy Sister, both standing in the vestibule between the inevitable Philadelphia two front doors, the outer one as inevitably open all day long. And I see myself, when, in answer to our ring, the servant had opened the inner one as well, entering in a fresh access of shyness the wide lofty hall, with the front and back parlours to the right; Philadelphians had no drawing-rooms then but were content with parlours, as Penn had been who knew them by no other name. Compared to the rich Philadelphian's house to-day, my Grandfather's looks very unpretending, but when houses like it, with two big parlours separated by folding doors, first became the fashion in Philadelphia, they passed for palaces with Philadelphians who disapproved of display, and the "tradesmen" living soberly in them were rebuked for aspiring to the luxury of princes. I cannot imagine why, for the old Colonial houses are, many of them, as lofty and more spacious, though it was the simple spaciousness of my Grandfather's and the loftiness of its ceilings that gave it charm.

DRAWING ROOM AT CLIVEDEN

My Grandfather's two parlours, big as they were, would strike nobody to-day as palatial. It needs the glamour time throws over them for me to discover princely luxury in the rosewood and reps masterpieces of a deplorable period with which they were furnished, or in their decoration of beaded cushions and worsted-work mats and tidies, the lavish gifts of a devoted family. But I cannot remember the parlours and forget the respect with which they once inspired me. I own to a lingering affection for their crowning touch of ugliness, an ottoman with a top of the fashionable Berlin work of the day—a white arum lily, done by the superior talent of the fancy store, on a red ground filled in by the industrious giver. It stood between the two front windows, so that we might have the additional rapture of seeing it a second time in the mirror which hung behind it. Opposite, between the two windows of the back parlour, was a "Rogers Group" on a blue stand; and a replica, with variations, of both the ottoman and the "Rogers Group" could have been found in every other Philadelphia front and back parlour. I recall also the three or four family portraits which I held in tremendous awe, however I may feel about them now; and the immensely high vases, unique creations that could not possibly have been designed for any purpose save to ornament the Philadelphia mantelpiece; and the transparent lamp-shade, decorated with pictures of cats and children and landscapes, that at night, when the gas was lit, helped to keep me awake until I could escape to bed; and the lustre chandeliers hanging from the ceiling—what joy when one of the long prisms came loose and I could capture it and, looking through it, walk across the parlours and up the stairs straight into the splendid dangers of Rainbow Land!

I had no time for these splendours on my arrival, nor, fortunately for me, was I left long to the tortures of my shyness. At the end of the hall, facing me, was the wide flight of stairs leading to the upper stories, and on the first landing, at their turning just where a few more steps led beyond into the back-building dining-room, my Grandmother, in her white cap and purple ribbons, stood waiting. In my memory she and that landing are inseparable. Whenever the door bell rang, she was out there at the first sound, ready to say "Come right up, my dear!" to whichever one of her innumerable progeny it might he. To her right, filling an ample space in the windings of the back stairs, was the inexhaustible pantry which I knew, as well as she, we should presently visit together. Though there could not have been in Philadelphia or anywhere quite such another Grandmother, even if most Philadelphians feel precisely the same way about theirs, she was typical too, like the house and the street. She belonged to the generation of Philadelphia women who took to old age almost as soon as they were mothers, put on caps and large easy shoes, invented an elderly dress from which they never deviated for the rest of their lives, except to exchange cashmere for silk, the everyday cap for one of fine lace and wider ribbons, on occasions of ceremony, and who as promptly forgot the world outside of their household and their family. I do not believe my Grandmother had an interest in anybody except her children, or in anything except their affairs; though this did not mean that she gave up society when it was to their advantage that she should not. In her stiff silks and costly caps, she presided at every dinner, reception, and party given at home, as conscientiously as, in her sables and demure velvet bonnet, she made and returned calls in the season.

My other memories are of comfortable, spacious rooms, good, solid, old-fashioned furniture, a few more old and some better-forgotten new family portraits on the walls, the engraving of Gilbert Stuart's Washington over the dining-room mantelpiece, the sofa or couch in almost every room for the Philadelphia nap before dinner, the two cheerful kitchens where, if the servants were amiable, I sometimes played, and, above all, the most enchanting back-yard that ever was or could be—we were not so elegant in those days as to call it a garden.

IV

Since it has been the fashion to revive everything old in Philadelphia, most Philadelphians are not happy until they have their garden, as their forefathers had, and very charming they often make it in the suburbs. But in town my admiration has been asked for gardens that would have been lost in my Grandfather's back-yard, and for a few meagre plants springing up about a cold paved square that would have been condemned as weeds in his luxuriant flower beds.

The kindly magnifying glasses of memory cannot convert the Spruce Street yard into a rival of Edward Shippen's garden in Second Street where the old chronicles say there were orchards and a herd of deer, or of Bartram's with its trees and plants collected from far and wide, or of any of the old Philadelphia gardens in the days when in Philadelphia no house, no public building, almost no church, could exist without a green space and great trees and many flowers about it, and when Philadelphians loved their gardens so well, and hated so to leave them, that there is the story of one at least who came back after death to haunt the shady walks and fragrant lawns that were fairer to her than the fairest Elysian Fields in the land beyond the grave. Much of the old beauty had gone before I was born, much was going as I grew from childhood to youth. My Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, has described the Philadelphia garden of his early years, "with vines twined over arbours, where the magnolia, honeysuckle and rose spread rich perfume of summer nights, and where the humming bird rested, and scarlet tanager, or oriole, with the yellow and blue bird flitted in sunshine or in shade." Though I go back to days before the sparrows had driven away not only the worms but all others of their own race, I recall no orioles and scarlet tanagers, no yellow and blue birds. Philadelphia's one magnolia tree stood in front of the old Dundas house at Broad and Walnut.

All the same, my Grandfather's was a back-yard of enchantment. A narrow brick-paved path led past the kitchens; on one side, close to the wall dividing my Grandfather's yard from the next door neighbour's, was a border of roses and Johnny-jump-ups and shrubs—the shrubs my Grandmother used to pick for me, crush a little in her fingers, and tie up in a corner of my handkerchief, which was the Philadelphia way—the most effective way that ever was—to make them give out their sweetness. Beyond the kitchens, where the yard broadened into a large open space, the path enclosed, with a wider border of roses, two big grass plots which were shaded by fruit trees, all pink and white in the springtime. Wistaria hung in purple showers over the high walls. I am sure lilacs bloomed at the kitchen door, and a vine of Isabella grapes—the very name has an old Philadelphia flavour and fragrance—covered the verandah that ran across the entire second story of the back-building. If sometimes this delectable back-yard was cold and bare, in my memory it is more apt to be sweet and gay with roses, shrubs and Johnny-jump-ups,—summer and its pleasures oftener waiting on me there: probably because my visits to my Grandfather's were more frequent in the summer time. But I have vague memories of winter days, when the rose bushes were done up in straw, and wooden steps covered the marble in front, and ashes were strewn over the icy pavement, and snow was piled waist-high in the gutter.

V

From the verandah there was a pleasant vista, up and down, of the same back-yards and the same back buildings, just as from the front windows there was a pleasant vista, up and down, of the same red-brick fronts, the same white marble steps, the same white and green shutters,—only one house daring upon originality, and this was Bennett's, the ready-made clothes man, whose unusually large garden filled the opposite corner of Eleventh and Spruce with big country-like trees over to which I looked from my bedroom window. As a child, instinctively I got to know that inside every house, within sight and beyond, I would find the same front and back parlours, the same back-building dining-room, the same number of bedrooms, the same engraving of George Washington over the dining-room mantelpiece, the same big red cedar chest in the third story hall and, in summer, the same parlours turned into cool grey cellars with the same matting on the floor, the same linen covers on the chairs, the same curtainless windows and carefully closed shutters, the same white gauze over mirrors and chandeliers—to light upon an item for gauze "to cover pictures and glass" in Washington's household accounts while he lived in Philadelphia is one of the things it is worth searching the old archives for.

BACK-YARDS, ST. PETER'S SPIRE IN THE DISTANCE

Instinctively, I got to know too that, in every one of these well-regulated interiors where there was a little girl, she must, like me, be striving to be neither seen nor heard all the long morning, and sitting primly at the front window all the long afternoon, and that, if she ever played at home it was, like me, with measured steps and modulated voice: at all times cultivating the calm of manner expected of her when she, in her turn, would have just such a red brick house and just such a delectable back-yard of her own. Thus, while the long months at the Convent kept me busy cultivating every spiritual grace, during the occasional holiday at Eleventh and Spruce I was well drilled in the Philadelphia virtues.

CHAPTER III: A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA—CONTINUED

I

Naturally, I could not live in Spruce Street and not believe, as every Philadelphian should and once did, that no other kind of a house except the Spruce Street house was fit for a Philadelphian to live in. The Philadelphian, from infancy, was convinced by his surroundings and bringing-up that there was but one way of doing things decently and respectably and that was the Philadelphia way, nor can my prolonged exile relieve me from the sense of crime at times when I catch myself doing things not just as Philadelphians used to do them.

I was safe from any such crime in my Grandfather's house. All Philadelphia might have been let in without fear. Had skeletons been concealed in the capacious cupboards, they would have been of the approved Philadelphia pattern. My Grandfather was not at all of Montaigne's opinion that order in the management of life is sottish, but looked upon it rather as "Heaven's first law." His day's programme was the same as in every red brick house with white marble steps and a back-yard full of roses and shrubs and Johnny-jump-ups. Everything at Eleventh and Spruce was done according to the same Philadelphia rules at the same hour, from the washing of the family linen on Monday, when Sunday's beef was eaten cold for dinner, to the washing of the front on Saturday morning, when Philadelphia streets from end to end were all mops and maids, rivers and lakes.

When my Grandfather, with his family on their knees around him, began the day by reading morning prayers in the back-building dining-room, he could have had the satisfaction of knowing that every other Philadelphia head of a family was engaged in the same edifying duty, but I hope, for every other Philadelphia family's sake, with a trifle less awe-inspiring solemnity. After being present once at my Grandfather's prayers, nobody needed to be assured that life was earnest.

He did not shed his solemnity when he rose from his knees, nor when he had finished his breakfast of scrapple and buckwheat cakes and left the breakfast table. He was as solemn in his progress through the streets to the Philadelphia Bank, at Fourth and Chestnut, of which he was President, and having said so much perhaps I might as well add his name, Thomas Robins, for in his day he was widely known and it is a satisfaction to remember, as widely appreciated both in and out of Philadelphia. His clothes were always of the most admirable cut and fit and of a fashion becoming to his years, he carried a substantial cane with a gold top, his stock was never laid aside for a frivolous modern cravat, his silk hat was as indispensable, and his slow walk had a dignity royalty might have envied. He was a handsome old man and a noticeable figure even in Philadelphia streets at the hour when John Welsh from the corner, and Biddles and Cadwalladers and Whartons and Peppers and Lewises and a host of other handsome old Philadelphians with good Philadelphia names from the near neighborhood, were starting downtown in clothes as irreproachable and with a gait no less dignified. The foreigner's idea of the American is of a slouchy, free-and-easy man for ever cracking jokes. But slouchiness and jokes had no place in the dictionary or the deportment of my Grandfather and his contemporaries, at a period when Philadelphia supplied men like John Welsh for its country to send as representatives abroad and there carry on the traditions of Franklin and John Adams and Jefferson. My Father—Edward Robins—inherited more than his share of this old-fashioned Philadelphia manner, making a ceremony of the morning walk to his office and the Sunday walk to church. But it has been lost by younger generations, more's the pity. In memory I would not have my Grandfather a shade less solemn, though at the time his solemnity put me on anything but easy terms with him.

II

The respectful bang of the front door upon my Grandfather's dignified back after breakfast was the signal for the family to relax. The cloth was at once cleared, my Grandmother and my Aunts—like all Philadelphia mothers and daughters—brought their work-baskets into the dining-room and sat and gossiped there until it was time for my Grandmother to go and see the butcher and the provision dealer, or for my Aunts to make those formal calls for which the morning then was the unpardonable hour.

INDEPENDENCE SQUARE AND THE STATE HOUSE

It seems to me, in looking back, as if my Grandmother could never have gone out of the house except on an errand to the provision man, such an important part did it play in her daily round of duties. She never went to market. That was not the Philadelphia woman's business, it was the Philadelphia man's. My Grandfather, at the time of which I write, must have grown too old for the task, which was no light one, for it meant getting up at unholy hours every Wednesday and every Saturday, leaving the rest of the family in their comfortable beds, and being back again in time for prayers and eight o'clock breakfast. I cannot say how this division of daily labour was brought about. The century before, a short time as things go in Philadelphia, it was the other way round and the young Philadelphia woman at her marketing was one of the sights strangers in the town were taken to see. But in my time it was so much the man's right that as a child I believed there was something essentially masculine in going to market, just as there was in making the mayonnaise for the salad at dinner. A Philadelphia man valued his salad too highly to trust its preparation to a woman. It was almost a shock to me when my Father allowed my motherly little Aunt to relieve him of the responsibility in the Spruce Street house. And later on, when he re-married and again lived in a house of his own, and my Step-Mother made a mayonnaise quite equal to his or to any mere man's, not even to her would he shift the early marketing,—his presence in the Twelfth Street Market as essential on Wednesday and Saturday mornings as in the Stock Exchange every day—and his conscientiousness was the more astonishing as his genius was by no means for domesticity. Philadelphia women respected man's duties and rights in domestic, as in all, matters. I remember an elderly Philadelphian, who was stopping at Blossom's Hotel in Chester, where all Americans thirty years ago began their English tour, telling me the many sauces on the side table had looked so good she would have liked to try them and, on my asking her why in the world she had not, saying they had not been offered to her and she thought perhaps they were for the gentlemen. Only a Philadelphian among Americans could have given that answer.

Towards three o'clock in the Spruce Street house, my Grandmother would be found, her cap carefully removed, stretched full-length upon the sofa in the dining-room. The picture would not be complete if I left out my Father's rage because the dining-room was used for her before-dinner nap as for almost every purpose of domestic life by the women of the family. I have often wondered where he got such an un-Philadelphia idea. In every house where there was a Grandmother, she was taking her nap at the same hour on the same sofa in the same dining-room. I could never see the harm. It was the most comfortable room in the house, without the isolation of the bedroom or the formality of the parlours.

At four, my Grandfather returned from his day's work, the family re-assembled, holding him in sufficient awe never to be late, and dinner was served. The hour was part of the leisurely life of Philadelphia as ordered in Spruce Street. Philadelphians had dined at four during a hundred years and more, and my Grandfather, who rarely condescended to the frivolity of change, continued to dine at four, as he continued to wear a stock, until the end of his life. It was no doubt because of the contrast with Convent fare that the dinner in my recollection remains the most wonderful and elaborate I have ever eaten, though I rack my brains in vain to recall any of its special features except the figs and prunes on the high dessert dishes, altogether the most luscious figs and prunes ever grown and dried, and the decanter at my Grandfather's place from which he dropped into his glass the few drops of brandy he drank with his water while everybody else drank their water undiluted. When friends came to dinner, I recall also the Philadelphia decanter of Madeira, though otherwise no greater ceremony. Dinner was always as solemn an affair in my Grandfather's house as morning prayers or any act of daily life over which he presided, the whole house, at all times when he left it, relapsing into dressing-gown and slippered ease after the full-dress decorum his presence required of it.

The eight o'clock tea is a more definite function in my memory, perhaps because the hours of waiting for it crept by so slowly. After dinner, the Aunts, my Father, the one Uncle who lived at home, vanished I never knew where, though no doubt Philadelphia supplied some amusement or occupation for the forlorn wreck four o'clock dinner made of the afternoon. But the interval was spent by my Grandfather and Grandmother at one of the front parlour windows, the old-fashioned Philadelphia afghan over their knees, their hands folded, while I, alone, my Sister having had the independence to vanish with the grown-ups, sat at the other, not daring to break the silence in which they looked out into the drowsy street for the people who seldom came and the events that never happened; nothing disturbing the calm of Spruce Street save the Sunday afternoon invasion of the colored people in their Sunday clothes from every near alley. It gives me a pang now to pass and see the window empty that once was always filled, in the hour before twilight, by those two dear grey heads.

III

As I grew a little older, I had the courage to bring a book to the window. It was there I read The Lamplighter which I confuse now with the memory of our own lamplighter making his rounds; and The Initials with a haughty Hilda for heroine—she must have been haughty for all real heroines then were; and Queechy and The Wide, Wide World and Faith Gartney's Girlhood, against whose sentiment I am glad to say I revolted. And mixed up with these were Mrs. Southworth's Lost Heiress and the anonymous Routledge, light books for whose presence I cannot account in my Grandfather's serious house. Does anybody read Routledge now? Has anybody now ever heard of it? What trash it was, but, after the improving romances with a religious moral of the Convent Library, after Wiseman's edifying Fabiola and Newman's scholarly—beyond my years—Callista, how I revelled in it, with what a choking throat I galloped through the lovesick chapters! I could recite pages of it to myself to relieve the dreariness of those long drives in the Third Street car, or the long waiting in the dreary station. To this day I remember the last sentence—"with his arm around my waist and my face hidden on his shoulder, I told him of the love, folly and pride that had so long kept me from him." Could Queechy, could Faith Gartney's Girlhood have been more sentimental than that? I dare not look up the old books to see, lest their charm as well as their sentiment should fade in the light of a more critical age. Then Scott and Dickens, Miss Edgeworth, more often Holiday House, filled the hours before tea. After all, the old division of the day, the young generation would be ashamed to go back to, had its uses.

CHRIST CHURCH INTERIOR

IV

The tea, when announced, was worth waiting, or putting down the most entrancing book, for. Had I my way I would make Philadelphia dine again at four o'clock for the sake of the tea—of the frizzled beef that only Philadelphia ever frizzled to a turn, the smoked salmon that only Philadelphia ever smoked as an art, the Maryland biscuits that ought to be called Philadelphia biscuits for they were never half so good in their native land, the home-made preserves put up in that sunshiny kitchen where lilacs bloomed at the door. After all this long quarter of a century, the smell of beef frizzling would take me back to Eleventh and Spruce on a winter evening as straight as the fragrance of the flowering bean carries me to Pompeii in the early springtime, or of garlic to the little sunlit towns of Provence at any season of the year. The tea was a triumph of simplicity, but when there were guests it became a feast. As a rule, it was the meal to which the children and grandchildren who did not live in the Spruce Street house were invited, and loved best to be invited. For on these occasions my Grandmother could be relied upon to provide stewed oysters, the masterpiece of Margaret, her old grey-haired cook; and oyster croquettes from Augustine's—my Grandfather would as soon have begun the day without prayers as my Grandmother have given a feast without the help of Augustine, that caterer of colour who was for years supreme in Philadelphia; brandy peaches that, like the preserves, had been put up at home, the brandy poured in with unexpected lavishness for so temperate a household; and little round cakes with white icing on top—what dear little ghosts from out a far past they seemed when, after a quarter of a century in a land where people know nothing of the delights of little round cakes with white icing on top, I ate them again at Philadelphia feasts. If the solemn, dignified Grandfather at one end of the table kept our enjoyment within the bounds of ceremony, we felt no restraint with the little old Grandmother who beamed upon us from the other, as she poured out the tea and coffee with hands trembling so that, in her later years, the man servant,—usually coloured and not to Philadelphia as yet known as butler or footman,—always stood close by to catch the tea or coffee pot when it fell, which it never did.

V

I recall more formal family reunions, above all the Golden Wedding, as impressive as a court function, the two old people enthroned at the far end of the front parlour, the sons and daughters and grandchildren approaching in a solemn line—an embarrassed line when it came to the youngest, always shy in the awful presence of the Grandfather—and offering, each in turn, their gifts. We were by no means a remarkable family, to the unprejudiced we may have seemed a commonplace one, my forefathers evidently having decided that leaving England for America was a feat remarkable enough to satisfy the ambitions of any one family and having then proceeded to rest comfortably on their respectable laurels, but we took each other with great seriousness. The oldest Aunt, who was married and lived in New York, received on her annual visit to Spruce Street the homage due to a Princess Royal, and no King or Emperor could have caused more of a flutter than my Grandfather when he honoured one of his children with a visit. Family anniversaries were scrupulously observed, the legend of family affection was kept up as conscientiously, whatever it cost us in discomfort, and there were times when we paid heavily. I would have run many miles to escape one Uncle who, when he met me in the street, would stop to ask how I was, and how we all were at home, and then would stand twisting his moustache in visible agony, trying to think what the affectionate intimacy between us that did not exist required him to say, while I thanked my stars that we were in the street and not in a house where he would have felt constrained to kiss me. We were horribly exact in this matter of kissing. There was a family legend of another Uncle from New York who once, when he came over for some family meeting, was so eager to do his duty by his nieces that he kissed not only all of them—no light task—but two or three neighbours' little girls into the bargain. I think, however, that every Philadelphia family took itself as seriously and that our scruples were not a monopoly brought with us from Virginia and Maryland. In a town where family names are handed down from generation to generation, so that a family often will boast, as ours did, not only a "Jr." but a "3d," and lose no opportunity to let the world know it, family feeling is not likely to be allowed to wilt and die.

Every public holiday also was a family affair to be observed with the rigours of the family feast. Christmas for me, when I did not celebrate it at the Convent with Midnight Mass and a Crèche in the chapel and kind nuns trying to make me forget I had not gone home like other little girls, took me to the Spruce Street house in time to look on at the succession of Uncles and Aunts who dropped in on Christmas Eve and went away laden with bundles, and carrying in some safe pocket a collection of envelopes with a crisp new greenback in each, the sum varying from one hundred dollars to five according to the age of the child or grandchild whose name was on the envelope—my Grandfather gave with the fine patriarchal air he maintained in all family relations. The family appropriation of Thanksgiving Day and Washington's Birthday I did not grasp until after I left school, for while I was at the Convent they were both spent there, where they dwindled into insignificance compared to Reverend Mother's feast and its glories. As a rule, I must have been at the Convent as well for the Fourth of July, though I retain one jubilant vision of myself and a bag of torpedoes in the back-yard, solemnizing a little celebration among the roses. And I have larger visions of military parades in broiling sunshine and of the City Troop filling the quiet streets with their gorgeousness which awed me long before the knowledge of their historic origin and uniform inspired me with reverence.

VI

Other duties and pleasures and observances that for most Philadelphia children were scattered through the interminable year, were crowded into my short holiday: visits to the dentist, to Dr. Hopkins, Dr. White's assistant, it being a test of Philadelphia respectability to have one's teeth seen to by Dr. White or one of his assistants or students, and the regular appointment was as much of obligation for me as Mass on Sunday; visits to the Academy of Fine Arts in the old Chestnut Street building, as I remember set back at the end of a court that made of it a place apart, a consecrated place which I entered with as little anticipation of amusement as St. Joseph's Church hidden in Willing's Alley, and was the more surprised therefore to be entertained, as I must have been, by Benjamin West, for of no other painter there have I the faintest recollection; visits to the Academy of Natural Sciences, where I liked the rows upon rows of stuffed birds, and the strange things in bottles, and the colossal skeletons that filled me with the same delicious shivers as the stories of afreets and genii in The Arabian Nights; visits to Fairmount Park, leagues away, houses left behind before it was reached, where the mysterious machinery of the Waterworks was as terrifying as the skeletons, and I thought it much pleasanter outside under the blue sky; visits to the theatre—the most wonderful visits of all, for they took me out into the night that I knew only from stolen vigils in the Convent dormitory, or glimpses from the Spruce Street windows. Romance was in the dimly-lit streets, in the stars above, in the town after dark, which I was warned I was never to brave alone until I can laugh now to think how terrified I was the first time I came home late by myself, in my terror jumping into a street-car and claiming the protection of a contemptuous young woman whom work had not allowed to draw a conventional line between day and night.

CLASSIC FAIRMOUNT

I have never got rid of that suggestion of romance, not so much in the theatre itself as in the going to it, and, to this day, a matinée in broad daylight will bring back a little of the old thrill. But nothing can bring back to any theatre the glitter, the brilliancy, the splendour of the old Chestnut, the old Walnut, the old Arch, then already dingy with age I have no doubt, but transfigured by my childhood's ecstasies in them. Nothing can persuade me that any plays have been, or could be, written to surpass in beauty, pathos and humour, Solon Shingle, and Arrah-na-Pogue, and Our American Cousin, and The Black Crook, and Ours, though I have forgotten all but their names; that in opera Clara Louise Kellogg ever had a rival; that in gaiety and wit La Grande Duchesse and La Belle Hélène could be eclipsed; or that any actors could compete with Sothern and Booth and Mrs. Drew and the Davenports, and Charlotte Cushman as Meg Merrilies—there was a bit of good old melodramatic acting to make a small Convent girl's flesh creep! Shakespeare was redeemed by Booth from the dulness of the Convent reading-book and entered gloriously into my Convent life. For one happy winter, it was not I who led the long procession down to the refectory, though nobody could have suspected it, but the Ghost of Hamlet's Father, with, close behind me, in gloom absorbed, the Prince of Denmark, mistaken by the unknowing for the little girl, my friend, whose father, with more than the usual father's amiable endurance, had taken me with her and her sister to see the play of Hamlet during the Christmas holidays.

DOWN PINE STREET

The theatre has become part of the modern school course. If an actor like Forbes-Robertson gives a farewell performance of Hamlet, or a manager like Beerbohm Tree produces a patriotic melodrama, or the company from the Théâtre Français perform one of the rare classics that the young person may be taken to, I have seen a London theatre filled with school girls and boys. From what I hear I might imagine the theatre and the opera to be the most serious studies of every Philadelphia school. At the Convent I should have envied the modern students could I have foreseen their liberty, but they have more reason to envy me. The gilt has been rubbed too soon off their gingerbread, too soon has the tinsel of their theatre been tarnished. My Spartan training gave me a theatre that can never cease to be a Wonderland, just as it endowed me with a Philadelphia that will endure, until this world knows me no more, as a beautiful, peaceful town where roses bloom in the sunny back-yards, and people live with dignity behind the plain red brick fronts of its long, straight streets.

CHAPTER IV: AT THE CONVENT

I

As the theatre, in my memory, still gives the crowning glory to my holiday in Philadelphia, so, in looking back, the brief holiday seems the spectacle, the romance, the supreme moment, of my early years. The scene of my every-day life was that Convent of the Sacred Heart at Torresdale which was the end of the interminable ride in the Third Street horse-car and the shorter ride in the Pennsylvania Railroad train.

The Philadelphian who did not live in the Convent would have seen it the other way round, for the Convent was unlike enough to Philadelphia to suggest the romance of the unusual. Only in one or two respects did it provide me with facts that every proper Philadelphian was brought up to know, and let me say again that because I had to find out the others—the more characteristically Philadelphia facts—for myself, I think they probably made a stronger impression upon me than upon the Philadelphian guiltless of ever straying, or of ever having been allowed to stray, from the approved Philadelphia path.

II

When the Ladies of the Sacred Heart decided to open a Convent in Philadelphia, an uncertain enterprise if it is considered how un-Catholic Philadelphia was, they began in a fairly modest way by taking a large house at Torresdale, with lawns and gardens and woods and a great old-fashioned barn, the country seat of a Philadelphian whose name I have forgotten. It stood to the west of the railroad, at a discreet distance from the little cluster of houses by the riverside that alone meant Torresdale to the Philadelphians who lived in them.

The house, I can now see, was typical as I first knew it, the sort the Philadelphian built for himself in the suburbs at a period too removed from Colonial days for it to have the beauty of detail and historic interest of the Colonial house, and yet near enough to them for dignity of proportion and spaciousness to be desirable, if not essential to a Philadelphian's comfort. A wide, lofty hall ran from the front door to the back, on either side were two large airy rooms with space between for the broad main stairway, a noble structure, and the carefully concealed back stairway—half-way up which in my time was the little infirmary window where, at half past ten every morning, Sister Odille dispensed pills and powders to those in need of them. Along the entire front of the house was a broad porch,—the indispensable Philadelphia piazza—its roof supported by a row of substantial columns over which roses and honeysuckle clambered fragrantly and luxuriantly in the June sunshine. The house was painted a cheerful yellow that went well with the white of the woodwork about the windows and the porch: not a very beautiful type of house, but pleasant, substantial, luxurious, and making as little outward show of its luxury as the plain red brick town house of the wealthy Philadelphian.

How comfortable a type of house it was to live in, I know from experience of another, not a school, within sight, a ten minutes' walk across the fields, and like it in design and arrangement and even colour, in everything except size,—which my Father took one summer: to me a most memorable summer as it was the first I spent outside the Convent limits from the beginning to the end of the long holiday. The jerry-builder had had no part in putting up the solid, well-constructed walls which stood firm against winter storms and winds, and were no less a protection from the torrid heat of a Philadelphia summer. But fashion can leave architecture no more alone than dress. Already, the newer group of houses down by the Delaware were built of the brown stone which, to my mind, dates the beginning of the Philadelphian's fall from architectural grace, the beginning of his distrust in William Penn's plans for his well-being and of his foolish hankering after the fleshpots of New York.

LOUDOUN, MAIN STREET GERMANTOWN

The Convent, before I came to it, had been a victim to the brown stone fashion. With success, the pleasant old country house had grown too small for the school into which it had been converted, and a southern wing had been added: a long, low building with the Chapel at the far end, all built in brown stone and in a style that passed for Gothic and that a thousand times I could have wished based upon any other model. For the upper room in the wing, ambitiously christened by somebody Gothic Hall, had a high pointed roof that made it an ice-house in winter and, for our sins, it was used as the Dormitory of the Sacred Heart where I slept. I can recall mornings when the water was frozen in our pitchers while the big stove, in the middle of the high-pitched room, burned red hot as if to mock at us as, with numbed fingers, we struggled to make our beds and wash ourselves and button and hook on our clothes. And the builders had so contrived that summer turned our fine Gothic Dormitory into a fiery furnace. How many June nights, contrary to all the rules, have I hung out of the little, horribly Gothic window at the head of my alcove, gasping in the warm darkness that was so sweet and stifling with the fragrance of the flowers in Madame Huguet's garden just below.

I had not been long at the Convent before another brown stone wing extended to the north and two stories were added to the main building which, for the sake of harmony, was now painted brown from top to bottom. In a niche on this new façade, a statue of the Sacred Heart was set, and all semblance to the old country house was gone, except for the broad porch without and the well-proportioned rooms within. But these, and later improvements, additions and alterations cannot make me forget the Convent as it was when I first came to it, growing up about the simple, solidly-built, spacious yellow house that was once the Philadelphian's ideal of suburban comfort and so like the house where I spent my most memorable summer, so like, save for the size and the colour, my Great-Grandfather Ambrose White's old house on the Turnpike at Chestnut Hill, so like innumerable other country houses of the same date where I visited.

III

The Convent rule and discipline could not alter the changing of the seasons as Philadelphia ordered them. They might appear to us mainly regulated by feasts and fasts—All Saints and All Souls, the milestones on the road to Christmas; Lent and the month of St. Joseph heralding the approach of spring; the month of Mary and the month of the Sacred Heart, Ascension and Corpus-Christi, as ardent and splendid as the spring and summer days they graced. But, all the same, each season came laden with the pleasures held in common by all fortunate Philadelphia children who had the freedom of the country or the countrified suburbs.

The school year began with the fall, when any night might bring the first frost and the first tingle in the air—champagne to quicken the blood in a school girl's veins, and make the sitting still through the long study and class hours a torture. The woods shone with gold; the Virginia creeper flamed on the front porch; sickel pears fell, ripe and luscious, from the tree close to the Chapel where it was against the law to go and pick them up but where no law in the world could have barred the way; chestnuts and hickory nuts and the walnuts that stained my fingers black to open offered a substantial dessert after as substantial a dinner as ever children were served with. But those were the joyful years when hunger never could be satisfied and digestion was equal to any surfeit of raw chestnuts—or raw turnips for that matter, if the season supplied no lighter dainties, or of next to anything that could be picked up and eaten. I know I drew the line only at the huge, white, oversweet mulberries strewing the grass by the swings in Mulberry Lane, that favourite scene of the war to the knife we waged under the name of Old Man and Bands, primitive games not to be outdone by the Tennis and Hockey of the more sophisticated modern school girl.

The minute the Refectory was left for the noonday hour of recreation on a brisk autumn day, there was a wild scamper to the woods where, just beyond the gate that led into them, the hoary old chestnut trees spread their shade and dropped their fruit on either side the hill between the Poisonous Valley, a thrill in its deadly name, and the graveyard, few crosses then in the green enclosure which now, alas! is too well filled. The shadow of death lay so lightly upon us that I recall to-day only the delicious rustle of eager feet through the fallen leaves, and the banging of stone upon stone as hickory nuts cracked between them, I feel only the delicious pricking of the chestnut burrs in the happy, hardened fingers of the school girl. And these, anyway, are memories I share with every Philadelphian who, as a child, wandered in the suburbs or the near country when the woods were gold and scarlet, and the way through them was carpeted with leaves hiding rich stores of nuts for the seeker after treasure.

But no Philadelphia child in the shelter of her own house could know the meaning of the Philadelphia winter as I knew it in the Convent, half frozen in that airy dormitory of the Sacred Heart, shivering in shawl and hood through early Mass in the icy Chapel, still huddled in my shawl at my desk or scurrying as fast as discipline would wink at through the windy passages. The heating arrangements, somehow, never succeeded in coping with the extreme cold of a severe winter in the large rooms and halls of the new wings, and I must confess that we were often most miserably uncomfortable. I cannot but wonder what the pampered school girls of the present generation in the same Convent would say to such discomfort. But it did us no harm. Indeed, though I shiver at the memory, I am sure it did us good. We came out the healthier and hardier for it, much as the Englishman does from his cold house, the coldest in the world. The old conditions of a hardier life, that either killed or cured, did far more to make a vigorous people than all the new-fangled eugenics ever can.

If I had little of the comfort of the Philadelphia child in the Philadelphia house, I shared with him the outdoor pleasures which winter provided by way of compensation—the country white under snow for weeks and weeks, snowballs to be made and snow houses built, sliding to be had on the frozen lake, and coasting down the long hill just beyond the gate into the woods, when there were sleds to coast on. And what excitement in the marvellous snow-storms that have vanished with other marvels of my youth—the storms that put the new blizzard to shame, when the snow drifts were mountains high, and it took all the men on the farm, with Big John at their head, to clear a way through the near paths and roads. I recall one storm in particular when my Father, who had been making his periodical visit to my Sister and myself, left the Convent at six, was snowed up in his train, and never reached the dingy Depot in Frankford until three the next morning, and when for days we got out of the house only for a solemn ten minutes' walk each noon on the wide front porch, where it was a shocking breach of discipline to be seen at all other times except on Thursday and Sunday, the Convent visiting days. Of the inspiriting rigours of a Philadelphia winter I was never in ignorance.

In the snow drifts and storms of winter Big John and his men were not more helpless than in the floods and slush that began with the first soft breath of the Philadelphia spring. Wearing our big shapeless overshoes, we waded through the puddles and jumped over the streams in the Convent paths and roads as, in town, Philadelphia children, with their "gums" on, jumped over the streams and waded through the puddles in the abominably paved streets. But then hope too began when the first spaces of green were uncovered by the melting snow. The first spring-beauty in the sunny spaces of the woods, the first flowery frost in the orchard, the first blooming of the tulip trees, were among the great events of the year. And what joy now in the new hunt!—what treasure of spring-beauties everywhere in the woods as the sun grew warmer, of shyer, retired hepaticas, of white violets running wild in the swampy fields beyond the lake, of sweet trailing arbutus, of Jacks-in-the-pulpit flourishing best in the damp thickets of the Poisonous Valley into which I never wandered without a tremor not merely because it was a forbidden adventure, but because, though I passed through it unscathed, I had seen so often the horrible and unsightly red rash one whiff from over its bushes and trees could bring out on the faces and hands of my schoolmates with a skin more sensitive than mine. Games lost their charm in the spring sunshine and our one pleasure was in the hunt, no longer for chestnuts and walnuts and hickory nuts, but solely for flowers, bringing back great bunches wilting in our hot little hands, to place before the shrine that aroused the warmest fervours of our devotion or was tended by the nun of our special adoration.

ENTRANCE TO FAIRMOUNT AND THE WASHINGTON STATUE

And before we knew it, the spring-beauties and hepaticas and white violets and Jacks-in-the-pulpit disappeared from the woods, and the flowery frost from the orchard, and the great blossoms from the tulip trees, and summer was upon us—blazing summer when we lay perspiring on our little beds up there in Gothic Hall where a few months before we shivered and shook, perspiration streamed from our faces on our school books at the study hour, more a burden than ever as we drooped and drowsed in the heat;—blazing summer when the fragrance of the roses hung heavy over Madame Huguet's garden and mingled with the too sweet fragrance of the honeysuckle about the columns of the porch and over every door;—blazing summer when all day long meadows and gardens and lawns swooned under the pitiless sunshine and we, who had braved the winter cold undismayed, never put as much as our noses out of doors until the hour of sunset;—blazing summer when for many years I saw the other girls going home, the gaiety of sea and mountain and change awaiting them, while my Sister and I stayed on, desolate at heart despite the efforts of the nuns to help us forget, feeling forlornly forsaken as we watched the green burnt up into brown and the summer flowers wilt and die, and the drought turn the roads to dust, and all Nature parched as we parched with it. The holiday dragged terribly and, reversing the usual order of things, I counted the days until school would begin again. However, at least I can say that I saw the Philadelphia summer in its full terrors as every Philadelphia child ever born, for whom wealth or chance opens no gate of escape, must see it and did see it of old.

And so for me in the Convent the seasons were the same as for the child in Philadelphia and its suburbs. And I learnt how cold Philadelphia can be, and how hot—if Penn, safe in England, was grateful for the greater nearness of his town to the sun, not a Philadelphian on the spot, sweltering through its midsummer heat, has ever yet shared his gratitude. And I learnt how beautiful Philadelphia is as it grows mild again after winter has done its worst, or as it cools off in the friendlier autumn sun. And not to know these facts is not to know Philadelphia.

IV

In the Convent regulation of daily life lay the unconquerable difference. Philadelphia has its laws and traditions that guide the Philadelphian through every hour and duty of the day, and the Philadelphian, who from the cradle does not obey these traditions and laws, can never be quite as other Philadelphians. The Sacred Heart is a French order, and the nuns imported their laws and traditions from France, qualified, modified, perhaps, on the way, but still with an unmistakable foreign flavour and tendency that could not pass unquestioned in a town where the first article of faith is that everybody should do precisely what everybody else does.

I remember when the Rhodes scholars were first sent from America to Oxford a friend of mine professed serious concern for the future of the University should they introduce buckwheat cakes on Oxford breakfast tables. And, really, he was not as funny as he thought. A man is a good deal what his food makes him. The macaroni-fed Italian is not as the sausage-and-sauerkraut-fed German, nor the Hindu who thrives on rice as the Irishman bred upon potatoes. Never was a town more concerned with the Question of Food than Philadelphia and I now see quite plainly that I, beginning my day at the Convent on coffee and rolls, could not have been as the correct Philadelphia child beginning the day in Philadelphia or the suburbs on scrapple and buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. Thus, the line of separation was drawn while I was still in short skirts with my hair cropped close.

The Convent day continued, as it began, with differences. I sat down at noon to the substantial French breakfast which at the Convent, as a partial concession to American ideals, became dinner. At half past three, like a little French girl, I had my goûter, for which even the French name was retained—how well I remember the big, napkin-lined basket, full of hunks of good gingerbread, or big crackers, or sweet rolls, passed round by Sister Duffy, probably the most generous of all generous Irishwomen, who would have slipped an extra piece into every little hand if she could, but who was so shockingly cross-eyed that we got an idea of her as a disagreeable old thing, an ogress, always watching to see if we took more than our appointed share. Quite recently I argued it all out again with the few old Sisters left to greet me on my first and only visit to the Convent during thirty years and, purely for the sake of the sentiment of other days. I refused to believe them when they insisted that Sister Duffy, who now lies at peace in the little graveyard on the hillside in the woods, wasn't cross at all, but as tender as any Sister who ever waited on hungry little girls! I would have given a great deal could she have come back, cross-eyes and all, with her big basket of gingerbread to make me feel at home again, as I could not in the Visitors' dining-room where my goûter was set out on a neatly spread table, even though on one side of me was "Marie" of Our Convent Days, my friend who had been Prince of Denmark in our Booth-stricken period, and on the other Miss Repplier, the chronicler of our childish adventures. It was the first time we three had sat there together since more years than I am willing to count, and I think we were too conscious that youth now was no longer of the company not to feel the sadness as keenly as the pleasure of the reunion in our old home.

Goûter, with its associations, has sent me wandering far from the daily routine which ended, in the matter of meals, with a supper of meat and potatoes and I hardly know what, at half past six, when little Philadelphia girls were probably just finishing their cambric tea and bread-and-butter, and even the buns from Dexter's when these had been added as a special treat or reward. How could we, upon so much heavier fare, have seen things, how could we have looked upon life, just as those other little girls did?

V

We did not play, any more than we ate, like the child in Philadelphia or its suburbs. One memory of our playtime I have common to all Philadelphia children of my generation: the memory of Signor Blitz, on a more than usually blissful Reverend Mother's Feast, taking rabbits out of our hats and bowls of gold-fish out of his sleeve, and holding a long conversation with the immortal Bobby, the most prodigious puppet that ever conversed with any professional ventriloquist. But this was a rare ecstasy never repeated.

MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN

What games the children in Rittenhouse Square and the Lanes of Germantown had, I cannot record, but of one thing I am sure: they did not go to the tune and the words of "Sur le pont d'Avignon," or "Qu' est-ce qui passe ici si tard," or "Il était un avocat." Nor, I fancy, were "Malbrough s'en va-t'en guerre" and "Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot," the songs heard in the Philadelphia nursery. Nor is it likely that "C'est le mois de Marie," which we sang as lustily all through May as the devout in France sing it in every church and every cathedral from one end of their land to the other, was the canticle of pious little Catholic children celebrating the month of Mary at St. Joseph's or St. Patrick's. Nor outside the Convent could the Bishop on his pastoral rounds have been welcomed with the "Vive! Vive! Vive! Monseigneur au Sacré Coeur, Quel Bonheur!" which, the title appropriately changed, was our form of welcome to every distinguished visitor. And, singing these songs and canticles, how could the associations and memories we were laying up for ourselves be the same as those of Philadelphia children whose ears and voices were trained on "Juanita" and "Listen to the Mocking Bird," or, it may be, "Marching through Georgia" and "Way down upon the Swanee River"? These things may make subtle distinctions, but they are distinctions that can never be overcome or outgrown.

In study hours, as in playtime and at meals, we were seldom long out of this French atmosphere. French class was only shorter than English. If we were permitted to talk at breakfast, it was not at all that we might amuse ourselves, but that we might practise our French which did not amuse us in the least. Many of the nuns were French, often, it is true, French from Louisiana or Canada, but their English was not one bit more fluent on that account. Altogether, there was less of Philadelphia than of France in the discipline, the devotions, and the relaxations of the Convent.

VI

But, of all the differences, the most fundamental, I think, came from the fact that the Convent was a Convent and taught us to accept the conventual, the monastic interpretation of life. We were there in, not only a French, but a cloistered atmosphere—the atmosphere that Philadelphia least of all towns could understand. The Friends had attained to peace and unworldliness by staying in their own homes and fulfilling their duty as fathers and mothers of families, as men and women of business. But the nuns saw no way to achieve this end except by shutting themselves out of the world and avoiding its temptations. The Ladies of the Sacred Heart are cloistered. They leave the Convent grounds only to journey from one of their houses to another, for care is taken that they do not, by staying over long in one school, form too strong an attachment to place or person. Where would be the use of being a nun if you were not made to understand the value of sacrifice? Their pupils are, for the time, as strictly cloistered. Not for us were the walks abroad by which most girls at boarding school keep up with the times—or get ahead of them. We were as closely confined to the Convent grounds as the nuns, except during the holidays or when a friend or relation begged for us a special outing. It was not a confinement depending on high stone walls and big gates with clanging iron chains and bars. But the wood fences running with the board walk above the railroad and about the woods and the fields and the gardens made us no less prisoners—willing and happy prisoners as we might be, and were. This gave us, or gave me at any rate, a curious idea of the Convent as a place entirely apart, a place that had nothing to do with the near town or the suburb in which it stood—a blessed oasis in the sad wilderness of the world.

There is no question that, as a result, I felt myself in anticipation a stranger in the wilderness into which I knew I must one day go from the oasis, and in which I used to imagine I should be as much of an exile as the Children of Israel in the desert. Of course I was not quite that when the time came, but that for an interval I was convinced I must be explains how unlike in atmosphere the Convent was to Eleventh and Spruce.

In all sorts of little ways I was confirmed in this belief by life and its duties at the Convent. For all that concerned me nearly, for all that was essential to existence here below, Philadelphia seemed to me as remote as Timbuctoo. I got insensibly to think of myself first not as a Philadelphian, not as an American, but as a "Child of the Sacred Heart,"—the first question under all circumstances was what I should do, not as a Philadelphian, but as a Child of the Sacred Heart.

ARCH STREET MEETING

I cannot say how much the mere name of the thing represented—the honour and the privilege—and there was not a girl who had been for any time a pupil who did not prize it as I did. And we were not given the chance to forget or belittle it. We were impressed with the importance of showing our appreciation of the distinction Providence had reserved for us—of showing it not merely by our increased faith and devotion, but by our bearing and conduct. We might be slack about our lessons. That was all right at a period when slackness prevailed in girls' schools and it was unfeminine, if not unladylike, to be too learned. But we were not let off from the diligent cultivation of our manners. Our faith and devotion were attended to in a daily half hour of religious instruction. But Sunday was not too holy a day for the Politeness Class that was held every week as surely as Sunday came round, in which we were taught all the mysteries of a Deportment that might have given tips to the great Turveydrop himself,—how to sit, how to walk, how to carry ourselves under all circumstances, how to pick up a handkerchief a passer-by might drop—an unspeakable martyrdom of a class when each unfortunate student, in turn, went through her paces with the eyes of all the school upon her and to the sound of the stifled giggles of the boldest. We never met one of our mistresses in the corridors that we did not drop a laboured curtsey—a shy, deplorably awkward curtsey when I met the Reverend Mother, Mother Boudreau, a large, portly, dignified nun from Louisiana and a model of deportment, who inspired me with a respectful fear I never have had for any other mortal. We could not answer a plain "Yes" or "No" to our mistresses, but the "Madam" must always politely follow. "Remember" was a frequent warning, "remember that wherever, or with whom, you may be, to behave like children of the Sacred Heart!" A Child of the Sacred Heart, we were often told, should be known by her manners. And so impressed were we with this precept that I remember a half-witted, but harmless, elderly woman whom the nuns, in their goodness, had kept on as a "parlour boarder" after her school days were over, telling us solemnly that when she was in New York and went out shopping with her sister, the young men behind the counter at Stewart's would all look at her with admiring eyes and whisper to each other, "Is it not easy to see that Miss C. is a Child of the Sacred Heart?"

THE TRAIN SHED, BROAD STREET STATION

Seriously, the training did give something that nothing else could, and an admirable training it was for which girls to-day might exchange more than one brain-bewildering course at College and be none the worse for it. In my own case, I admit, I should not mind having had more of the other training, as it has turned out that my work in life is of the sort where a quick intelligence counts for more than an elegant deportment. But I can find no fault with the Convent for neglect. Girls then were not educated to work. If you had asked any girl anywhere what was woman's mission, she would have answered promptly—had she been truthful—"to find a husband as soon as possible;" if she were a Convent girl,—a Child of the Sacred Heart—she would have added, "or else to become a nun." Her own struggles to fit herself for any other career the inconsiderate Fates might drive her into, so far from doing her any harm, were the healthiest and most bracing of tonics. Granted an average mind, she could teach herself through necessity just the important things school could not teach her through a routine she didn't see the use of. She emerged from the ordeal not only heroically but successfully, which was more to the point. A young graduate from Bryn Mawr said to me some few days ago that when she looked at her mother and the women of her mother's generation and realized all they had accomplished without what is now called education, she wondered whether the girls of her generation, who had the benefit of all the excess of education going, would or could accomplish more, or as much. To tell the truth, I wonder myself. But then it may be said that I, belonging to that older generation, am naturally prejudiced.

VII

There are moments when, reflecting on all I lost as a Philadelphian, I am half tempted to regret my long years of seclusion, busy about my soul and my manners, at the Convent. A year or so would not have much mattered one way or the other. I led, however, no other life save the Convent life until I was seventeen. I knew no other standpoint save the Convent standpoint.

But the temptation to regret flies as quickly as it comes. I loved the life too well at the time, I love it too well in the retrospect, to have wanted then, or to want now, to do without it. It was a happy life to live, though I would not have been a school girl had I not, with the school girl's joy in the morbid, liked nothing better than to pose as the unhappiest of mortals—to be a school girl was to be misunderstood I would have vowed, had I, in my safe oasis, ever heard the expression or had the knowledge to guess at its meaning. I loved every stone in the house, brown and ugly as every stone might be, I loved every tree in the woods whether or no it dropped pleasant things to devour, I loved every hour of the day whatever might be its task. I had a quick memory, study was no great trouble to me, and I enjoyed every class and recitation. I enjoyed getting into mischief—I wore once only the Ribbon for Good Conduct—and I enjoyed being punished for it. In a word, I got a good deal out of my life, if it was not exactly what a girl was sent to school to get. And it is as happy a life to remember, with many picturesque graces and absurdities, joys and sorrows, that an uninterrupted existence at Eleventh and Spruce could not have given.

I have no desire to talk sentimental nonsense about my school days having been my happiest. That sort of talk is usually twaddle. It was not as school that I loved the Convent, though as school it had its unrivalled attractions; it was as home. When the time came to go from it I suffered that sharp pang felt by most girls on leaving home for school. I remember how I, who affected a sublime scorn for the cry-baby, blubbered like one myself when I was faced with the immediate prospect of life in Philadelphia. How well I recall my despair—how vividly I see the foolish scene I made in the empty Refectory, shadowy in the dusk of the June evening, where I was rehearsing the valedictory of the Graduating Class which I had been chosen to recite, and where, after the first few lines I broke down to my shame, and sniffled and gurgled and sobbed in the lap of the beloved mistress who was doing her best to comfort me, and also to keep me from disgracing her, as I should have done by any such scene on the great day itself.

If the Convent stands for so much in my memory, it would be ungrateful to regret the years I spent in it. The sole reason would be my loss, not as a student, but as a Philadelphian, for this loss was the price I paid. But the older I grow, the better I realize that to the loss I owe an immeasurable gain. For as a child I never got so accustomed to Philadelphia as not to see it at all. The thing we know too well is often the thing we see least clearly, or we should not need the philosopher to remind us that that is best which nearest lieth. All through my childhood and early youth I saw Philadelphia chiefly from the outside, and so saw it with more awe and wonder and lasting delight than those Philadelphians who, in childhood and early youth, saw it only from the inside,—too near for it to come together into the picture that tells.

CHAPTER V: TRANSITIONAL

I

And so it was with a great fear in my heart that, in the course of time and after I had learned as little as it was decent for Philadelphia girls to learn in the days before Bryn Mawr, I left the Convent altogether for Philadelphia. I can smile now in recalling the old fear, but it was no smiling matter at seventeen: a weeping matter rather, and many were the tears I shed in secret over the prospect before me. My holidays had not revealed Philadelphia to me as a place of evil and many dangers. But as I was to live there, it represented the world,—the sinful world, worse, the unknown world, to battle with whose temptations my life and training at the Convent had been the preparation.

ST PETER'S, INTERIOR

It added to the danger that sin could wear so peaceful an aspect and temptation keep so comfortably out of sight. During an interval, longer than I cared to have it, for I did not "come out" at once as a Philadelphia girl should and at the Convent I had made few Philadelphia friends, my personal knowledge of Philadelphia did not go much deeper than its house fronts. For the most part they bore the closest family resemblance to those of Eleventh and Spruce, with the same suggestion of order and repose in their well-washed marble steps and neatly-drawn blinds. My Father had then moved to Third Street near Spruce, and there rented a red brick house, one-half, or one-third, the size of my Grandfather's, but very like it in every other way, to the roses in the tiny back-yard and to the daily family routine except that, with a courageous defiance of tradition I do not know how we came by, we dined at the new dinner hour of six and said our prayers in the privacy of our bedrooms. The Stock Exchange was only a minute away, and yet, at our end, Third Street had not lost its character as a respectable residential street. We had for neighbours old Miss Grelaud and the Bullitts and, round the corner in Fourth Street, the Wisters and Bories and Schaumbergs,—with what bated breath Philadelphia talked of the beauty and talents of Miss Emily Schaumberg, as she still was!—and many other Philadelphia families who had never lived anywhere else. Life went on as silently and placidly and regularly as at the Convent. I seemed merely to have exchanged one sort of monastic peace for another and the loudest sound I ever heard, the jingling of my old friend the horse-car, was not so loud as to disturb it.

If I walked up Spruce Street, or as far as Pine and up Pine, silence and peace enfolded me. Peace breathed, exuded from the red brick houses with their white marble steps, their white shutters below and green above, their pleasant line of trees shading the red brick pavement. The occasional brown stone front broke the uniformity with such brutal discord that I might have imagined the devil I knew was waiting for me somewhere lurked behind it, and have seen in its pretentious aping of New York fashion the sin in which Philadelphia, as the Sinful World, must abound. I cannot say why it seemed to me, and still seems, so odious, for there were other interruptions to the monotony I delighted in—the beautiful open spaces and great trees about the Pennsylvania Hospital and St. Peter's; the old Mint which, with its severe classical façade, seemed to reproach the frivolity of the Chestnut Street store windows on every side of it; General Paterson's square grey house with long high-walled garden at Thirteenth and Locust; the big yellow Dundas house at Broad and Walnut, with its green enclosure and the magnolia for whose blossoming I learnt to watch with the coming of spring; that other garden with wide-spreading trees opposite my Grandfather's at Eleventh and Spruce: old friends these quickly grew to be, kindly landmarks on the way when I took the walks that were so solitary in those early days, through streets where it was seldom I met anybody I knew, for the Convent had made me a good deal of a stranger in my native town,—where it was seldom, indeed, I met anybody at all.

II

When I went out, I usually turned in the direction of Spruce and Pine, for to turn in the other, towards Walnut, was to be at once in the business part of the town where Philadelphia women preferred not to be seen, having no desire to bridge over the wide gulf of propriety that then yawned between the sex and business. Except for the character of the buildings and the signs at the doors, I might not have been conscious of the embarrassing difference between this and my more familiar haunts. Bankers' and stock-brokers' offices were on every side, but the Third Street car did not jingle any louder as it passed, my way was not more crowded, peace still enveloped me. I gathered from my Father, who was a broker, that the Stock Exchange, when buying and selling had to be done on the spot and not by telephone as in our degenerate days, was now and then a scene of animation, and it might be of noise and disorder, more especially at Christmas, when a brisker business was done in penny whistles and trumpets than in stocks and shares. But the animation overflowed into Third Street only at moments of panic, to us welcome as moments of prosperity for they kept my Father busy—we thrived on panics—and then, once or twice, I saw staid Philadelphians come as near running as I ever knew them to in the open street.

THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM PINE STREET

Now and then youth got the better of me and I sought adventure in the unadventurous monotony of Walnut Street where the lawyers had their offices, the courts not having as yet migrated up to Broad Street. It was usually lost in heavy legal slumber and if my intrusion was bold, at least nobody was about to resent it. Nor could there be a doubt of the eminent respectability into which I intruded. The recommendation to Philadelphia of its lawyers was not the high esteem in which they were held throughout the country, but their social standing at home—family gave distinction to the law, not the law to family. Approved Philadelphia names adorned the signs at almost every office door and not for some years was the evil day to dawn when the well-known Philadelphia families who inherited the right of the law would be forced to fight for it with the alien and the Jew. For me, I think I am at an age when I may own that the irreproachable names on the signs were not the principal attraction. Sometimes, from one of the somnolent offices, a friendly figure would step into the somnolent street to lighten me on my way, and it was pleasanter to walk up Walnut in company than alone. When I went back the other day, after many years and many changes for Philadelphia and myself, I found most of the familiar signs gone, but at one door I was met by a welcome ghost—but, was it the ghost of that friendly figure or of my lonely youth grasping at romance or its shadow? How many years must pass, how many experiences be gone through, before a question like that can be asked!

If I followed Third Street beyond Walnut to Chestnut, I was in the region of great banks and trust companies and newspaper offices and the old State House and the courts. I had not had the experience, or the training, to realize what architectural monstrosities most of the new, big, heavy stone buildings were, nor the curiosity to investigate what went on inside of them, but after the quiet red brick houses they seemed to have business written all over them and the street, compared to Spruce and Walnut, appeared to my unsophisticated eyes so thronged that I did not have to be told it was no place for me. It was plain that most women felt as I did, so careful were they to efface themselves. I remember meeting but few on Chestnut Street below Eighth until Mr. Childs began to devote his leisure moments and loose change to the innocent amusement of presenting a cup and saucer to every woman who would come to get it, and as most women in Philadelphia, or out of it, are eager to grab anything they do not have to pay for, many visited him in the Ledger office at Sixth and Chestnut.

SECOND STREET MARKET

As I shrank from doing what no other woman did, and, as the business end of Chestnut Street did not offer me the same temptation as Walnut, I never got to know it well,—in fact I got to know it so little that my ignorance would seem extraordinary in anybody save a Philadelphian, and it remained as strange to me as the street of a foreign town. I could not have said just where my Grandfather's Bank was, not once during that period did I set my foot across the threshold of the State House, unwilling as I am to confess it. But perhaps I might as well make a full confession while I am about it, for the truth will have to come out sooner or later. Let me say then, disgraceful as I feel it to be, that though I spent two years at least in the Third Street house, with so much of the beauty of Philadelphia's beautiful past at my door, it was not until some time afterwards, when we had gone to live up at Thirteenth and Spruce, that I began to appreciate the beauty as well as my folly in not having appreciated it sooner. St. Peter's Church and the Pennsylvania Hospital I could not ignore, many of my walks leading me past them. But I was several years older before I saw Christ Church, inside or out. The existence of the old Second Street Market was unknown to me; had I been asked I no doubt would have said that the Old Swedes Church was miles off; I was unconscious that I was surrounded by houses of Colonial date; I was blind to the meaning and dignity of great gables turned to the street, and stately Eighteenth Century doorways, and dormer windows, and old ironwork, and a patchwork of red and black brick; I was indifferent to the interest these things might have given to every step I took at a time when, too often, every step seemed forlornly barren of interest or its possibility. Into the old Philadelphia Library on Fifth Street I did penetrate once or twice, and once or twice sat in its quiet secluded alcoves dipping into musty volumes: a mere accident it must have been, my daily reading being provided for at the easy-going, friendly, pleasantly dingy, much more modern Mercantile Library in Tenth Street. But the memory of these visits, few as they were, is one of the strongest my Third Street days have left with me, and I think, or I hope, I must have felt the charm of the old town if I may not have realized that I did, for I can never look back to myself as I was then without seeing it as the background to all my comings and goings—a background that lends colour to my colourless life.

III

I can understand my ignorance and blindness and indifference, if I cannot forgive them. All my long eleven years at the Convent I had had the virtue of obedience duly impressed upon me, and, though there custom led me easily into the temptation of disobedience, when I returned to Philadelphia I was at first too frightened and bewildered to defy Philadelphia's laws written and especially unwritten, for in these I was immediately concerned. I was the more bewildered because I had come away from the Convent comfortably convinced of my own importance, and it was disconcerting to discover that Philadelphia, so far from sharing the conviction, dismissed me as a person of no importance whatever. I had also my natural indolence and moral cowardice to reckon with. I have never been given to taking the initiative when I can avoid it and it is one of my great grievances that, good and thorough American as I am, I should have been denied my rightful share of American go. Anyway, I did not have to stay long in Philadelphia to learn for myself that the Philadelphia law of laws obliged every Philadelphian to do as every other Philadelphian did, and that every Philadelphian was too much occupied in evading what was not the thing in the present to bother to cultivate a sentiment for the past. Moreover, I had to contend against what the Philadelphians love to call the Philadelphia inertia, while all the time they talk about it they keep giving substantial proofs of how little reason there is for the talk. The Philadelphia inertia only means that it is not good form in Philadelphia to betray emotion on any occasion or under any circumstance. The coolness, or indifference, of Philadelphians at moments and crises of great passion and excitement has always astonished the outsider. If you do not understand the Philadelphia way, as I did not then, you take the Philadelphian's talk literally and believe the beautiful Philadelphia calm to be more than surface deep, as I did who had not the sense as yet to see that, even if this inertia was real, it was my business to get the better of it and to develop for myself the energy I imagined my town and its people to be without. I have often thought that the Philadelphia calm is a little like the London climate that either conquers you or leaves you the stronger for having conquered it.

IV

If one of Philadelphia's unwritten laws closed my eyes to what was most worth looking at when I took my walks abroad, another, no less stringent, limited those walks to a small section of the town. On the map Philadelphia might stretch over a vast area with the possibility of spreading indefinitely, but for social purposes it was shut in to the East and the West by the Delaware and the Schuylkill, to the North and the South by a single line of the old rhyming list of the streets: "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine." I have not the antiquarian knowledge to say who drew that rigid line, or when what had been all right for Washington and Provosts of the University and no end of distinguished people became all wrong for ordinary mortals—I have heard the line ridiculed, but never explained. No geographical boundary has been, or could be, more arbitrary, but there it was, there it is, and the Philadelphian who crosses it risks his good name. Nor can the stranger, though unwarned, disregard it with impunity. I remember when I met Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist, the first friend I made in London, and she told me the number of the house away out North Twenty-second Street where she lived for two years in Philadelphia, I had a moment of Philadelphia uncertainty as to whether her literary distinction could outbalance her social indiscretion. Philadelphia never had a doubt, but was serenely unconscious of her presence during her two years there. And yet she had then edited and published, with the help of the Rossettis, her husband's Life of Blake which had brought her fame in England, and her up-town house must have been one of the most interesting to visit. Walt Whitman was a daily guest and few American men of letters passed through Philadelphia without finding their way to it. Philadelphia, however, would scruple going to Heaven were Heaven north of Market Street.

It is an absurd prejudice, but I am not sure if I have got rid of it now or if I ever shall get rid of it, and when I was too young to see its absurdity I would as soon have questioned the infallibility of the Pope. It was decreed that nobody should go north of Market or south of Pine; therefore I must not go; the reason, probably, why I never went to Christ Church—a pew had not been in my family for generations to excuse my presence in North Second Street—why I never, even by accident, passed the Old Swedes or the Second Street Market. It was bad enough to cross the line when I could not help myself. I am amused now—though my sensitive youth found no amusement in it—when I think of my annoyance because my Great-Grandfather, on my Mother's side, old Ambrose White whose summer home was in Chestnut Hill, lived not many blocks from the Meeting House and the Christ Church Burial Ground where Franklin lies, in one of those fine old Arch Street houses in which Friends had lived for generations since there had been Arch Street houses to live in. Besides, Mass and Vespers in the Cathedral led me to Logan Square, to my dismay that religion should lead where it was as much as my reputation was worth to be met. I have wondered since if it was as compromising for the Philadelphian from north of Market Street to be found in Rittenhouse Square.

FOURTH AND ARCH STREETS MEETING HOUSE

Outwardly I could see no startling difference between the forbidden Philadelphia and my Philadelphia—"there is not such great odds, Brother Toby, betwixt good and evil as the world imagines," I might have said with Mr. Shandy had I known that Mr. Shandy said it or that there was a Mr. Shandy to say anything so wise. The Philadelphia rows of red brick houses, white marble steps, white shutters below and green above, rows of trees shading them, were much the same north of Market Street and south of Pine, except that south of Pine the red brick houses shrank and the white marble and white shutters grew shabby, and north of Market their uniformity was more often broken by brown stone fronts which, together with the greater width of many of the streets, gave a richer and more prosperous air than we could boast down our way. But it was not for Philadelphians, of all people, to question why, and it must have been two or three years later, when I was less awed by Philadelphia, that I went up town of my own free will and out of sheer defiance. I can remember the time when an innocent visit to so harmless a place as Girard College appeared to me in the light of outrageous daring. That is the way in my generation we were taught and learned our duty in Philadelphia.

My excursions to the suburbs, except to Torresdale, were few, which was my loss for no other town's suburbs are more beautiful, and they were not on Philadelphia's Index. Time and the alien had not yet driven the Philadelphian out to the Main Line as an alternative to "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine," but many had country houses there; Germantown was popular, Chestnut Hill and Torresdale were beyond reproach. My Father, however, who cultivated most of Philadelphia's prejudices, was unexpectedly heterodox in this particular. He could not stand the suburbs—poor man, he came to spending suburban summers in the end—and of them all he held Germantown most sweepingly in disfavour. I cannot remember that he gave a reason for his dislike. It may be that its grey-stone houses offended him as an infidelity to Philadelphia's red brick austerity. But he could never speak of it with patience and from him I got the idea that it was the abyss of the undesirable. One of the biggest surprises of my life was, when I came to look at it with my own eyes, to find it as desirable a place as beauty and history can make.

V

The shopping I had not the money to do would have kept me within a more exclusive radius, for a shopping expedition restricted the Philadelphian who had any respect for herself to Chestnut Street between Eighth and Fifteenth. Probably I was almost the only Philadelphian who knew there were plenty of cheap stores in Second Street, but that I bought the first silk dress I ever possessed there was one of the little indiscretions I had the sense to keep to myself. A bargain in Eighth Street might be disclosed as a clever achievement, if not repeated too often. The old Philadelphia name and the historic record of Lippincott's, for generations among the most successful Philadelphia publishers, would have permitted a periodical excursion into Market Street, even if unlimited latitude, anyway, had not been granted to wholesale houses in the choice of a street. The well-known reliability of Strawbridge and Clothier might warrant certain purchases up-town and a furniture dealer as reliable, whose name and address I regret have escaped me, sanction the housekeeper's penetrating still further north. But it was safer, everything considered, to keep to Chestnut Street, and on Chestnut Street to stores approved by long patronage—you were hall-marked "common" if you did not, and the wrong name on the inside of your hat or under the flap of your envelope might be your social undoing. The self-respecting Philadelphian would not have bought her needles and cotton anywhere save at Mustin's, her ribbons anywhere save at Allen's. She would have scorned the visiting card not engraved by Dreka. She would have gone exclusively to Bailey's or Caldwell's for her jewels and silver; to Darlington's or Homer and Colladay's for her gloves and dresses; to Sheppard's for her linen; to Porter and Coates, after Lippincott's, for her books; to Earle's for her pictures;—prints were such an exotic taste that Gebbie and Barrie could afford to hide in Walnut Street, and the collector of books such a rarity that Tenth, or was it Ninth? was as good as any other street for the old book store where I had so unpleasant an experience that I could not well forget it though I have forgotten its proprietor's name. A sign in the window said that old books were bought, and one day, my purse as usual empty but my heart full of hope, I carried there two black-bound, gilt-edged French books of the kind nobody dreams of reading that I had brought home triumphantly as prizes from the Convent: but I and my poor treasures were dismissed with such contempt and ridicule that my spirit was broken and I could not summon up pluck to carry them to Leary's, in Ninth Street, who were more liberal even than Charles Lamb in their definition, and to whom anything printed and bound was a book to be bought and sold.

If hunger overtook the shopper, she would have eaten her oyster stew only at Jones's on Eleventh Street or Burns's on Fifteenth; or if the heat exhausted her, she would have cooled off on ice-cream only at Sautter's or Dexter's, on soda-water only at Wyeth's or Hubbell's. The hours for shopping were as circumscribed as the district. To be seen on Chestnut Street late in the afternoon, if not unpardonable, was certainly not quite the thing.

VI

Shopping without money had no charm and could never help to dispose of my interminable hours. The placid beauty of the shopless streets was of a kind to appeal more to age than youth. I wonder to this day at the time I allowed to pass before I shook off my respect for Philadelphia conventions sufficiently to relieve the dulness of my life by straying from the Philadelphia beaten track. The most daring break at first was a stroll on Sunday afternoon over to West Philadelphia and to Woodland's. Later, when, with a friend, I went on long tramps through the Park, by the Wissahickon, to Chestnut Hill, it was looked upon as no less unladylike on our part than the new generation's cigarette and demand for the vote on theirs. But if I did my duty, I was sadly bored by it. Often I turned homeward with that cruel aching of the heart the young know so well, longing for something, anything, to happen on the way to interrupt, to disorganize, to shatter to pieces the daily routine of life. I still shrink from the sharp pain of those cool, splendid October days when Philadelphia was aglow and quiveringly alive, and with every breath of the brisk air came the desire to be up and away and doing—but away where in Philadelphia?—doing what in Philadelphia? I still shrink from the sharp pain of the first langourous days of spring when every Philadelphia back-yard was full of perfume and every Philadelphia street a golden green avenue leading direct to happiness could I have found the way along its bewildering straightness.

JOHNSON HOUSE, GERMANTOWN

If youth only knew! There was everywhere to go, everything to do, every happiness to claim. Philadelphia waited, the Promised Land of action and romance, had I not been hide-bound by Philadelphia conventions, absorbed in Philadelphia ideals, disdaining all others with the intolerance of my years. According to these conventions and ideals, there was but one adventure for the Philadelphia girl who had finished her education and arrived at the appointed age—the social adventure of coming out.

CHAPTER VI: THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE

I

Let me say at once that I know no adventure is more important for the Philadelphian, and that mine was scarcely worth the name as these things go in Philadelphia.

It is the one adventure that should be roses all the way, but for me it was next to no roses at all. To begin with, I was poor. My Father had lost his money in the years of upheaval following the Civil War and had never got it back again. Nowadays this would not matter. A girl of seventeen, when she comes home from school, can turn round, find something to do, and support herself. She could in the old days too, if she was thrown on her own resources. I had friends no older than myself who taught, or were in the Mint—that harbour of refuge for the young or old Philadelphia lady in reduced circumstances. But my trouble was that I was not supposed to be thrown on my own resources. A Philadelphia father would have felt the social structure totter had he permitted his daughter to work as long as he was alive to work for her. When he had many daughters and luck went against him, the advantage of this attitude was less obvious to them than to him. Exemplary as was the theory, which I applaud my Father for acting up to since it happened to be his, it had its inconvenience when put into practice. To be guarded from the hardship of labour by the devoted father did not always put money into the daughter's pocket.

THE CUSTOMS HOUSE

Had I been more at home in Philadelphia, my poverty might not have stood so much in my light. A hundred years before Gouverneur Morris had praised Philadelphia, which in its respect for "virtuous poverty" he thought so much more generous than other capitals where social splendour was indispensable, and in this the town had not changed. It was to Philadelphia's credit that a girl's social success did not depend on the length of her dressmaker's bill or the scale of her entertaining. More than one as poor as I would have a different story to tell. But I suffered from having had no social training or apprenticeship. The Convent had been concerned in preparing me for society in the next world, not in this, and I had stayed in the Convent too long to make the many friendships that do more than most things to launch a girl on her social career—too long, for that matter, to know what society meant.

It was a good thing that I did not know, did not realize what was ahead of me, that I allowed myself to be led like a Philadelphian to the slaughter, for a little experience of society is good for everybody. Unless men are to live like brutes—or like monks—they must establish some sort of social relations, and if the social game is played at all, it should be according to the rules. Nowhere are the rules so rigorous as in Philadelphia, nowhere in America based upon more inexorable, as well as dignified, traditions, and I do not doubt that because of the stumbling blocks in my path, I learned more about them than the Philadelphia girl whose path was rose-strewn. Were history my mission, it would be amusing to trace these traditions to their source—first through the social life of the Friends who, however, are so exclusive that should this part of the story ever be told, whether as romance or history, it must come from the inside; and then, through the gaieties of the World's People who flatter themselves they are as exclusive, and who have the name for it, and whose exclusiveness is wholesale license compared to that of the Friends:—through the two distinct societies that have lived and flourished side by side ever since Philadelphia was. But my concern is solely with the gaieties as I, individually, shared in them. Now that I have outlived the discomforts of the experience, I can flatter myself that, in my small, insignificant fashion, I was helping to carry on old and fine traditions.

II

The most serious of these discomforts arose from the question of clothes, a terrifying question under the existing conditions in the Third Street house, involving more industrious dress-making upstairs in the third story front bedroom than I cared about, and a waste of energies that should have been directed into more profitable channels. I sewed badly and was conscious of it. At the Convent, except for the necessity of darning my stockings, I had been as free from this sort of toiling as a lily of the field, and yet I too had gone arrayed, if hardly with the same conspicuous success, and, in my awkward hands, the white tarlatan—who wears tarlatan now?—and the cheap silk from Second Street, which composed my coming out trousseau, were not growing into such things of beauty as to reconcile me to my new task.

UNDER BROAD STREET STATION AT FIFTEENTH STREET

As unpleasant were the preliminary lessons in dancing forced upon me by my family when, in my pride of recent graduation with honours, it offended me to be thought by anybody in need of learning anything. One evening every week during a few months, two or three friends and cousins joined me in the Third Street parlour to be drilled into dancing shape for coming out by Madame Martin, the large, portly Frenchwoman who, in the same crinoline and heelless, sidelaced shoes, taught generations of Philadelphia children to dance. Even the Convent could not do without her, though there, to avoid the sinfulness of "round dances," we had, under her tuition, waltzed and polkaed hand in hand, a method which my family feared, if not corrected, might lead to my disgrace.

I seem rather a pathetic figure as I see myself obediently stitching and practising my steps without an idea of the true meaning and magnitude of the adventure I was getting ready for, or a chance of being set about it in the right way. That right way would have been for somebody to give a party or a dance or a reception especially for me to come out at. But nobody among my friends and relations was obliging enough to accept the responsibility, and at home my Father could not get so far as to think of it. He would have needed too disastrous a panic in Third Street to provide the money. Madame Martin's lessons were already an extravagance and when, on top of them, he had gone so far as to pay for my subscription to the Dancing Class, and, in a cabless town, for the carriage, fortunately shared with friends, to go to it in, he had done all his bank account allowed him to do to start me in life.

It would be as useful to explain that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west as to tell a Philadelphian that the Dancing Class to which I refer was not of the variety presided over by Madame Martin, but one to which Philadelphians went to make use of just such lessons as I had been struggling with for weeks. The origin of its name I never knew, I never asked, the Dancing Class being one of the Philadelphia institutions the Philadelphian took for granted: then, as it always had been and still is, I believe, a distinguished social function of the year. To belong to it was indispensable to the Philadelphian with social pretensions. It was held every other Monday, if I remember—to think I should have a doubt on a subject of such importance!-and the first of the series was given so early in the winter that with it the season may be said to have opened. Perhaps this fact helped my family to decide that it was at the Dancing Class I had best make my first appearance.

III

Youth is brave out of sheer ignorance. When the moment came, it never occurred to me to hesitate or to consider the manner of my introduction to the world. I was content that my Brother should be my sole chaperon. I rather liked myself in my home-made white tarlatan, feeling very much dressed in my first low neck. I entertained no misgivings as to the fate awaiting me, imagining it as inevitable for a girl who was "out" to dance and have a good time as for a bird to fly once its wings were spread. If there were men to dance with, what more was needed?—it never having entered into my silly head that it was the girl's sad fate to have to wait for the man to ask her, and that sometimes the brute didn't.

I had to go no further than the dressing-room at the Natatorium, where the Dancing Class then met, to learn that society was not so simple as I thought. I have since been to many strange lands among many strange people, but never have I felt so much of a stranger as when I, a Philadelphian born, doing conscientiously what Philadelphia expected of me, was suddenly dropped down into the midst of a lot of Philadelphia girls engaged in the same duty. There was a freemasonry among them I could not help feeling right away—the freemasonry that went deeper than the chance of birth and the companionship of duty—the freemasonry that came from their all having grown up together since their perambulator days in Rittenhouse Square, having learned to dance together, gone to children's parties together, studied at Miss Irwin's school together, spent the summer by the sea and in the mountains together, in a word, from their having done everything together until they were united by close bonds, the closer for being undefinable, that I, Convent bred, with not an idea, not a habit, not a point of view, in common with them, could not break through. I never have got quite over the feeling, though time has modified it. There is no loneliness like the loneliness in a crowd, doubly so if all the others in the crowd know each other. In the dressing-room that first evening it was so overwhelming to discover myself entirely out of it where I should have been entirely in, that, without the stay and support of my friend, of old the Prince of Denmark to my Ghost of Hamlet's Father, and her sister, who had come out under more favourable conditions, I do not think I could have gone a step further in the great social adventure.

As it was, with my heart in my boots, my hand trembling on my Brother's arm, to the music of Hassler's band, I entered the big bare hall of the Natatorium, and was out with no more fuss and with nobody particularly excited about it save myself.

THE PHILADELPHIA CLUB
THIRTEENTH AND WALNUT STREETS

Things were a little better once away from the dressing-room. My Brother was gay, had been out for two or three years, knew everybody. If he could not introduce me to the women he could introduce the men to me, and the freemasonry existing among them from their all having gone to the Episcopal Academy and the University of Pennsylvania together, from their all having played cricket and baseball and football, or gone hunting together, from their all belonging to the same clubs, was not the kind from which I need suffer. Besides, those were the days when it was easy for the Philadelphia girl to get to know men, to make friends of them, without the Philadelphia gossip pouncing upon her and the Philadelphia father asking them their intentions—they could call upon her as often as they liked and the Philadelphia father would retreat from the front and back parlours, she could go out alone with them and the Philadelphia father would not interfere, knowing they had been brought up to see in themselves her protectors, especially appointed to look out for her. Some signs of change I might have discerned had I been observant. More than the five o'clock tea affectation was to come of the new coquetting with English fashions. Enough had already come for me to know that if my Brother now and then asked me to go to the theatre, it was not for the pleasure of my company, but because a girl he wanted to take would not accept if he did not provide a companion for the sake of the proprieties. I am sure the old Philadelphia way was the most sensible. Certainly it was the most helpful if you happened to be a girl coming out with next to no friends among the women in what ought to have been your own set, with no chaperon to see that you made them, and, at the Dancing Class, with no hostess to keep a protecting eye on you but, instead, patronesses too absorbed in their triumphs to notice the less fortunate straggling far behind.

Well, anyway, if honesty forbids me to call myself a success, it is a satisfaction to remember that I did not have to play the wall-flower, which I would have thought the most terrible disaster that could befall me. To have to sit out the German alone would have been to sink to such depths of shame that I never afterwards could have held up my head. It was astonishing what mountains of despair we made of these social molehills! I can still see the sad faces of the girls in a row against the wall, with their air of announcing to all whom it might concern: "Here we are, at your service, come and rescue us!" But there was another dreadful custom that did give me away only too often. When a man asked a girl beforehand to dance the German, Philadelphia expected him to send her a bunch of roses: always the same roses—Boston buds, weren't they called?—and from Pennock's on Chestnut Street if he knew what was what. To take your place roseless was to proclaim that you had not been asked until the eleventh hour. It was not pleasant. However, if I went sometimes without the roses, I always had the partner. I had even moments of triumph as when, one dizzy evening before the assembled Dancing Class, I danced with Willie White.

It is not indiscreet to mention so great a person by name and, in doing so, not presuming to use it so familiarly—he was the Dancing Class, as far as I know, he had no other occupation; and his name was Willie, not William, not Mr. White. Willie, as Philadelphians said it, was a title of honour, like the Cœur de Lion or the Petit Caporal bestowed upon other great men—the measure of the estimate in which social Philadelphia held him. Bean Nash in the Pump Room at Bath was no mightier power than Willie White in the Dancing Class at the Natatorium. He ruled it, and ruled it magnificently: an autocrat, a tyrant, under whose yoke social Philadelphia was eager to thrust its neck. What he said was law, whom he approved could enter, whom he objected to was without redress, his recognition of the Philadelphian's claims to admission was a social passport. He saw to everything, he led the German, and I do not suppose there was a girl who, at her first Dancing Class her first winter, did not, at her first chance, take him out in the German as her solemn initiation. That is how I came to enjoy my triumph, and I do not remember repeating it for he never condescended to take me out in return. But still, I can say that once I danced with Willie White at the Dancing Class—And did I once see Shelley plain?

IV

There were other powers, as I was made quickly to understand—not only the powers that all Biddles, Cadwalladers, Rushes, Ingersolls, Whartons, in a word all members of approved Philadelphia families were by Philadelphia right, but a few who had risen even higher than that splendid throng and were accepted as their leaders. It was not one of the most brilliant periods in the social history of Philadelphia. Mrs. Rush had had no successor, no woman presided over what could have been given the name of Salon as she had. Even the Wistar parties, exclusively for men, discontinued during the upheaval of the Civil War, had not yet been revived. But, notwithstanding the comparative quiet and depression, there were a few shining social lights.

Had I been asked in the year of my coming out who was the greatest woman in the world, I should have answered, without hesitation, Mrs. Bowie. She, too, may be mentioned by name without indiscretion for she, too, has become historical. She was far from beautiful at the date to which I refer, she was no longer in her first youth, was inclined to stoutness and I fear had not learned how to fight it as women who would be in the fashion must learn to-day. She was not rich and the fact is worth recording, so characteristic is it of Philadelphia. The names of leaders of society in near New York usually had millions attached to them, those there allowed to lead paid a solid price for it in their entertaining. But Mrs. Bowie's power depended upon her personal fascination—with family of course to back it—which was said to be irresistible. And yet not to know her was to be unknown. Intimacy with her was to have arrived. At least a bowing acquaintance, an occasional invitation to her house, was essential to success or its dawning. She entertained modestly as far as I could gather from my experience,—as far as I can now depend on my memory—gave no balls, no big dinners; if there were select little dinners, I was too young and insignificant to hear of them. I never got farther than the afternoon tea to which everybody was invited once every winter, a comfortless crush in her small house, with next to nothing to eat and drink as things to eat and drink go according to the lavish Philadelphia standard. But that did not matter. Nothing mattered except to be there, to be seen there. I was tremendously pleased with myself the first time the distinction was mine, though of my presence in her house Mrs. Bowie was no doubt amiably unconscious. I never knew her to recognize me out of it, though I sometimes met her when she came informally to see one of my Aunts who was her friend, or to give me the smile at the Dancing Class that would have raised my drooping spirits. The only notice she ever spared me there was to express to my Brother—who naturally, brother-like, made me uncomfortable by reporting it to me—her opinion of my poor, unpretentious, home-made, Second Street silk as an example of the absurdity of a long train to dance in, which shows how completely she had forgotten who I was.

Her chief rival, if so exalted a personage could have a rival, was Mrs. Connor, from whom also a smile, a recognition, was equivalent to social promotion. Her fascination did not have to be explained. She was an unqualified beauty, though the vision I have retained is of beauty in high-necked blue velvet and chinchilla, which I could not have enjoyed at the Dancing Class or any evening party. I realise as I write that in the details of Philadelphia's social history I would come out badly from too rigid an examination.

V

To Mrs. Connor's I was never asked with or without the crowd. But other houses were opened to me, other invitations came, for, if I had not friends, my family had. My white tarlatan and my Second Street silk had grown shabby before the winter was half over. At many parties I got to know what a delightful thing a Philadelphia party was, and if I had gone to one instead of many I should have known as well. Philadelphia had a standard for its parties as for everything, and to deviate from this standard, to attempt originality, to invent the "freak" entertainments of New York, would have been excessively bad form. The same card printed by Dreka requested the pleasure of your company to the same Philadelphia house—the Philadelphia hostess would not have stooped to invite you to the Continental or the Girard, the LaPierre House or the Colonnade, which were the Bellevue and the Ritz of my day—where you danced in the same spacious front and back parlours, with the same crash on the floor, to the same music by Hassler's band: where you ate the same Terrapin, Croquettes, Chicken Salad, Oysters, Boned Turkey, Ice cream, little round Cakes with white icing on top, and drank the same Fish-House Punch provided by the same Augustine; where the same Cotillon began at the same hour with the same figures and the same favours and the same partners; where there was the same dressing-room in the second story front and the same Philadelphia girls who froze me on my arrival and on my departure. There was no getting away from the same people in Philadelphia. That was the worst of it. The town was big enough for a chance to meet different people in different houses every evening in the week, but by that arbitrary boundary of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine," it has made itself socially into a village with the pettiness and limitations of village life. I have never wondered that Philadelphians are as cordial to strangers as everybody who ever came to Philadelphia knows them to be—that Philadelphia doors are as hospitable as Thackeray once described them. Philadelphians have reason to rejoice and make the most of it when occasionally they see a face they have not been seeing regularly at every party they have been to, and hear talk they have not listened to all their lives.

THE NEW RITZ-CARLTON; THE FINISHING TOUCHES
THE WALNUT STREET ADDITION HAS SINCE BEEN MADE

Sometimes it was to the afternoon reception the card engraved by Dreka invited me, and then again it was to meet the same people and—in the barbarous mode of the day—to eat the same Croquettes, Chicken Salad, Terrapin, Boned Turkey, Ice-cream, and little round Cakes with white icing on top, and to drink the same Punch from Augustine's at five o'clock in the afternoon, and at least risk digestion in a good cause. But rarely did the card engraved by Dreka invite me to dinner, and I could not have been invited to anything I liked better. I have always thought dinner the most civilized form of entertainment. It may have been an entertainment Philadelphia preferred to reserve for my elders, and, if I am not mistaken, the most formal dinners, or dinners with any pretence to being public, were then usually men's affairs, just as the Saturday Club, and the Wistar parties had been, and the Clover Club, and the Fish-House Club were: from them women being as religiously excluded as from the dinners of the City Companies in London, or from certain monasteries in Italy and the East. Indeed, as I look back, it seems to me that woman's social presence was correct only in private houses and at private gatherings. Nothing took away my breath so completely on going back to Philadelphia after my long absence as the Country Clubs where men and women now meet and share their amusements, if it was not the concession of a dining-room to women by a Club like the Union League that, of old, was in my esteem as essentially masculine as the Philadelphia Lady thought the sauces at Blossom's Hotel in Chester.

But there were plenty of other things to do which I did with less rather than more thoroughness. I paid midday visits, wondering why duty should have set me so irksome a task. I received with friends on New Year's Day—an amazing day when men paid off their social debts and made, at some houses, their one call of the year, joining together by twos and threes and fours to charter a carriage, or they would never have got through their round, armed with all their courage either to refuse positively or to accept everywhere the glass of Madeira or Punch and the usual masterpiece from Augustine's. It was another barbarous custom, but an old Philadelphia custom, and Philadelphia has lost so many old customs that I could have wished this one spared. I went to the concerts of the Orpheus Club. I went to the Opera and the Theatre when I was asked, which was not often. I passed with the proper degree of self-consciousness the Philadelphia Club at Thirteenth and Walnut, the same row of faces always looking out over newspapers and magazines from the same row of windows. And I did a great many things that were pleasant and a great many more that were unpleasant, conscientiously rejecting nothing social I was told to do when the opportunity to do it came my way. But it all counted for nothing weighed in the balance with the one thing I did not do—I never went to the Assembly.

CHAPTER VII: THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE: THE ASSEMBLY

I

I am too good a Philadelphian to begin to talk about the Assembly in the middle of a chapter. It holds a place apart in the social life of Philadelphia of which annually it is the supreme moment, and in my record of my experiences of this life, however imperfect, I can treat it with no less consideration. It must have a chapter apart.

To go to the Assembly was the one thing of all others I wanted to do, not only on the general principle that the thing one wants most is the thing one cannot have, but because to go to the Assembly was the thing of all others I ought to have done. There could be no question of that. You were not really out in Philadelphia if you did not go; only the Friends could afford not to. And Americans from other towns felt much the same way about it, they felt they were not anybody if they were not invited, and they moved heaven and earth for an invitation, and prized it, when received, as highly as a pedigree. A few honoured guests were always at the Assembly.

THE HALL, STENTON

Philadelphians who are not on the Assembly list may pretend to laugh at it, to despise it, to sneer at the snobbishness of people who endeavour to draw a social line in a country where everybody is as good as everybody else and where those on the right side may look down but those on the wrong will not be induced to look up. And not one among those who laugh and sneer would not jump at the chance to get in, were it given them, at the risk of being transformed into snobs themselves. For the Assembly places the Philadelphian as nothing else can. It gives him what the German gets from his quarterings or the Briton from an invitation to Court. The Dancing Class had its high social standard, it required grandfathers as credentials before admission could be granted, the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania supplied no more authoritative assurance of Philadelphia respectability than its subscription list, but the Dancing Class was lax in its standard compared to the Assembly. I am not sure what was the number, what the quality, of ancestors the Assembly exacted, but I know that it was as inexorable in its exactions as the Council of Ten. It would have been easier for troops of camels to pass through the eye of a needle than for one Philadelphian north of Market Street to get through the Assembly door. I am told that matters are worse to-day when Philadelphia society has increased in numbers until new limits must be set to the Assembly lest it perish of its own unwieldiness. The applicants must produce not only forefathers but fathers and mothers on the list, and the Philadelphian whose name was there more than a century and a half ago cannot make good his rights if his parents neglected to establish theirs. And to be refused is not merely humiliation, but humiliation with Philadelphia for witness, and the misery and shame that are the burden of the humiliated.

It is foolish, I admit, society is too light a matter to suffer for; it is cruel, for the social wound goes deep. But were it ten times more foolish, ten times more cruel, I would not have it otherwise. Philadelphians preserve their State House, their Colonial mansions and churches; why should they not be as careful of their Assembly, since it has as historic a background and as fine Colonial and Revolutionary traditions? They are proud of having their names among those who signed the Declaration of Independence; why should they not take equal—or greater—pride in figuring among the McCalls and Willings and Shippens and Sims and any number of others on the first Assembly lists, since these are earlier in date? Besides, to such an extremity have the changes of the last quarter of a century driven the Philadelphian that he must make a good fight for survival in his own town. When I think of how mere wealth is taking possession of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine," how uptown is marrying into it, how the Jew and the alien are forcing their way in, I see in loyalty to the traditions of the Assembly of Philadelphian's strongest defence of the social rights which are his by inheritance. Should he let go, what would there be for him to catch on to again?

"PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF"

It would be different if what Philadelphia was getting in exchange were finer, or as fine. But it is not. The old exclusiveness, with its follies, was better, more amusing, than the new tendency to do away with everything that gave Philadelphia society its character. It was the charm and the strength of Philadelphia society that it had a character of its own and was not just like Boston or New York or Baltimore society. Nobody, however remote was their mission from social matters, could visit Philadelphia without being impressed by this difference, whether it was to discover, with John Adams, that Philadelphians had their particular way of being a happy, elegant, tranquil, polite people, or, with so unlikely an observer as Matthew Arnold, that "the leading families in Philadelphia were much thought of," and that Philadelphia names saying nothing to an Englishman said everything to every American. Who you were counted in Philadelphia, as what you knew in Boston, or what you were worth in New York, and there was not an American of old who did not accept the fact and respect it. Philadelphia society clung to the Philadelphia surface of tranquillity, of untroubled repose whatever might be going on beneath it, and in my time I would not like to say how disturbing and agitating were the scandals and intrigues that were said to be going on. They were rarely made public. It was not in Philadelphia as in London where next to everybody you meet has been or is about to be divorced, though it might be that next to everybody you met was not making it a practice to keep to the straight and narrow path, to be as innocent as everybody looked. Logan Square could have told tales, if the Divorce Court could not.

BED ROOM, STENTON, THE HOME OF JAMES LOGAN

But now Philadelphia has strayed from its characteristic exclusiveness; gone far to get rid of even the air of tranquillity. With the modern "Peggy Shippen" and "Sally Wister" alert to give away its affairs in the columns of the daily paper, it could not keep its secrets to itself if it wanted to. And it does not seem to want to—that is the saddest part of the whole sad transformation. It rather likes the world outside to know what it is doing and, worse, it takes that world as its model. Its aim apparently is to show that it can be as like every other town as two peas, so that, drinking tea to music at the Bellevue, dancing at the Ritz, lunching and dining and playing golf and polo at the Country Clubs, the visitor can comfortably forget he is not at home but in Philadelphia. The youth of Philadelphia have become eager to desert the Episcopal Academy and the University for Groton or St. Paul's, Harvard or Yale, in order that they may be trained to be not Philadelphians but, as they imagine, men of the world, forgetting the distinction there has hitherto been in being plain Philadelphians. At the moment when in far older towns of Europe people are striving to recover their character by reviving local costumes, language, and customs, Philadelphians are deliberately throwing theirs away with their old traditions. The Assembly is one of their few rare possessions left, and strict as they are with it in one way, in another they are playing fast and loose with it, holding it, as if it were a mere modern dance, at a fashionable hotel.

II

If I now regret, as I do, never having gone to the Assembly, it is because of all that it represents, all that makes it a classic. But at the time, my regret, though as keen, was because of more personal reasons. I could have borne the historic side of my loss with equanimity, it was the social side of it that broke my heart. I have had many bad quarters of an hour in my life, but few as poignant as that which followed the appearance at our front door of the coloured man who distributed the cards for the Assembly—far too precious to be trusted to the post—and who came to leave one for my Brother. It was an injustice that oppressed me with a sense of my wrongs as a woman and might have set me window-smashing had window-smashing as a protest been invented. Why should the Assembly be so much easier for men? My Brother had but to put on the dress suit he had worn it did not matter how many years, and as he was, like every other American young man, at work and an independent person altogether—a millionaire I saw in him—the price of the card in an annual subscription was his affair and nobody else's. But, in my case the price was not my affair. I had not a cent to call my own, I was not at work, I was denied the right to work, and, the Assembly coming fairly late in the season, my white tarlatan and Second Street silk showed wear and tear that unfitted them for the most important social function of the winter. Philadelphia women dressed simply, it is true; that used to be one of the ways the Quaker influence showed itself; they boasted then that their restraint in dress distinguished them from other American women. But simplicity does not mean cheapness or indifference. The Friends took infinite pains with their soft brown and silvery grey silks, with their delicate fichus and Canton shawls. The well-dressed Philadelphia woman knows what she has to pay for the elegance of her simplicity. And the Assembly has always called for the finest she could achieve, from the day when Franklin was made to feel the cost to him if his daughter was to have what she needed to go out "in decency" with the Washingtons in Philadelphia.

THE TUNNEL IN THE PARK

I had the common sense to understand my position and not to be misled by the poverty-stricken, but irresistible Nancies and Dollies who were enjoying a vogue in the novels of the day and who encircled empty bank accounts and big families with the halo of romance. To read about the struggles with poverty of the irresistible young heroine might be amusing, but I had no special use for them as a personal experience. It would have been preposterous for me to think for a moment that, without a decent gown, I could go to the Assembly and, to do myself justice, I did not think it. But by this time I knew what coming out and being out meant and, therefore, I appreciated the social drawback it must be for me not to be able to go. It explained, as nothing hitherto had, how far I was from being caught up in the whirl, and it is only the whirl that keeps one going in society—that makes society a delightful profession, and I think I realized this truth better than the people so extravagantly in the Philadelphia whirl as to have no time to think about it. All that winter I never got to the point of being less concerned as to where the next invitation was to come from than as to how I was to accept all that did come. There is no use denying that I was disappointed and suffered from the disappointment. One pays a heavier price for the first foolish illusion lost than for all the others put together, no matter how serious they are.

III

When the season was over, I had as little hope of keeping up in other essential ways. If society then adjourned from Philadelphia because the heat made it impossible to stay at home, it was only to start a new Philadelphia on the porch of Howland's Hotel at Long Branch or, as it was just then beginning to do, at Bar Harbor and in the camps of the Adirondacks, or, above all, at Narragansett. "It may be accepted as an incontrovertible truth," Janvier says in one of his Philadelphia stories, "that a Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to the Pier for August would refuse to believe, for that year at least, in the alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced absence from that damply delightful watering-place for two successive summers very probably would lead to a rejection of the entire Copernican system." If Philadelphians went abroad, which was much more exceptional then than now, it was to meet each other. I know hotels in London to-day where, if you go in the afternoon, it is just like an afternoon reception in Philadelphia, and hotels in Paris where at certain seasons you find nobody but Philadelphians talking Philadelphia, though the Philadelphian has not disappeared who does not want to travel because he finds Philadelphia good enough for him. And it has always been like that.

But I could not follow Philadelphia society in the summer time any more than I could go with it to the Assembly in the winter. I had reason to consider myself fortunate if I travelled as far as Mount Airy or Chestnut Hill out of the red brick oven Philadelphia used to be—is now and ever shall be!—from June to September. It was an event if I got off with the crowd—the linen-dustered, wilting-collared crowds; surely we are not so demoralized by the heat nowadays?—to Cape May or Atlantic City, to enjoy the land breeze blowing, from over the Jersey swamps, clouds of mosquitoes before it so that nobody could stir out of doors without gloves and a veil. These, however, were not the summer joys society demanded of me. The further I went into the social game, the less I got from it, and I had decided that for the poor it was not worth the candle at the end of the first year, or was it the second? That I should be uncertain shows how little my heart was in the business of going out.

THE BOAT HOUSES ON THE SCHUYLKILL

I did not necessarily give up every amusement because I did not go out. In fact, I cannot recall a dance that amused me as much as many a boating party on the Schuylkill in the gold of the June afternoon, or many a walking party through the Park in the starlit summer night. There also remained, had I chosen, the staid entertainment of the women who, for one reason or other, had retired from the gayer round, and whose amusements consisted of more intimate receptions, teas, without number, sewing societies. And it was the period when Philadelphia was waking up to the charms of the higher education for women,—to the dissipations of "culture." I had friends who filled their time by studying for the examinations Harvard had at last condescended to allow them to pass, or try to pass; others found their sober recreation by qualifying themselves as teachers and teaching in a large society formed to impart learning by correspondence: all these women keeping their occupation to themselves as much as possible, not wishing to make a public scandal in Philadelphia which had not accustomed itself to the spectacle of women working unless compelled to;—all this quite outside of the University set, which must have existed, if I did not know it, as the Bryn Mawr set exists to-day, but which, as far as my experience went, was then never heard of except by the fortunate and privileged few who belonged to it.

But this new amusement required effort, and experience had not made me in love with the amusement that had to be striven for, that had to be paid for by exertion of any kind. There was an interval when Philadelphia would have been searched in vain for another idler as confirmed as I. Having found nothing to do, I proceeded to do it with all my might. I stood in no need of the poet's command to lean and loaf at my ease, though I am afraid I leaned and loafed so well as to neglect the other half of his precept and to forget to invite my soul. To those years I now look back as to so much good time lost in a working life all too short at the best.

CHAPTER VIII: A QUESTION OF CREED

I

I may not have understood at the time, but I must have been vaguely conscious that if so often I felt myself a stranger in my native town, it was not only because of the long years I had been shut up in boarding-school, but because that boarding-school happened to be a Convent.

There were schools in Philadelphia and schools out of it as useful as Rittenhouse Square in laying the foundation for profitable friendships. Miss Irwin's furnished almost as good social credentials as a Colonial Governor in the family. But a Philadelphia Convent did the other thing as successfully. It was not the Convent as a Convent that was objected to. In Paris, it could lend distinction: the fact that, at the mature age of six, I spent a year at Conflans, might have served me as a social asset. In Louisiana, or Maryland, a Philadelphia girl could see its door close upon her, and not despair of social salvation. Everything depended upon where the Convent was. In some places, it had a social standing, in others it had none, and Philadelphia was one of the others. In France, in Louisiana, in Maryland, to be a Catholic was to be at the top of the social scale, approved by society; in Pennsylvania, it was to be at the bottom, despised by society.

This was another Philadelphia fact I accepted on faith. It was not until I began to think about Philadelphia that I saw how consistent Philadelphians were in their inconsistency. Their position in the matter was what their past had made it, and the inconsistency is in their greater liberality to-day. For Pennsylvania has never been Catholic, has never had an aristocratic Catholic tradition like England: to the Friends there, all the aristocracy of the traditional kind belongs. The people—the World's People—who rushed to Pennsylvania to secure for themselves the religious liberty William Penn offered indiscriminately to everybody, found they could not enjoy it if Catholics were to profit by it with them. They had not been there any time when, as one of the early Friends had the wit to see and to say, they "were surfeited with liberty," and the Friends, who refused to all sects alike the privilege of expressing their religious fervour in wood piles for witches and prison cells for heretics, could not succeed in depriving them of their healthy religious prejudice which, they might not have been able to explain why, concentrated itself upon the Catholic. Episcopalians approved of a doctrine of freedom that meant they could build their own churches where they would. Presbyterians and Baptists objected so little to each other that, for a while, they could share the same pulpit. Moravians put up their monasteries where it suited them best. Mennonites took possession of Germantown. German mystics were allowed to search in peace for the Woman in White and wait hopefully for the Millennium on the banks of the Wissahickon. Later on Whitefield set the whole town of Philadelphia to singing psalms, and Philadelphia refrained from interfering with what must have been an intolerable nuisance. Even Jews were welcome—their names are among early legislators and on early Assembly lists. Catholics, alone, they all agreed, had no right to any portion of Penn's gift, and popular opinion is often stronger than the law. Whatever ill will they had to spare from the Catholics, they reserved for the Friends to whom they owed everything—if Pennsylvania was "a dear Pennsylvania" to Penn, a good part of the blame lay with the "drunken crew of priests" and the "turbulent churchmen" whom he denounced in one of those letters to Logan, which are among the saddest ever written and published to the world.

After religious passions had run their course, the religious prejudice against the Catholic was handed down as social prejudice, which was all it was in my day when Philadelphians, who would question the social standing of a Catholic in Philadelphia simply because he was a Catholic, could accept him without question in the Catholic town of Baltimore or New Orleans simply because he was one. The Catholic continued to pay a heavy price socially for his religion in Philadelphia where it was not the thing to be a Catholic, where it never had been the thing, where it got to be less the thing as successive Irish emigrations crowded the Catholic churches. I fancy at the period of which I am writing Philadelphians, if asked, would have said that Catholicism was for Irish servants—for the illiterate. I remember a book called Kate Vincent I used to read at a Protestant Uncle's, where it may purposely have been placed in my way. Does anybody else remember it?—a story of school life with a heroine of a school girl who, in the serene confidence of her sixteen or seventeen summers, refuted all the learned Doctors of the Church by convicting a poor little Irish slavey of ignorance for praying to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints. I think I must have forgotten it with many foolish books for children read in my childhood had not Kate Vincent been so like Philadelphians in her calm superiority, though, fortunately, Philadelphians did not share her proselytising fervour. They went to the other extreme of lofty indifference and for them the Catholic churches in their town did not exist any more than the streets of little two-story houses south of Pine, a region into which they would not have thought of penetrating except to look up somebody who worked for them.

II

I might have learned as much during my holidays at my Grandfather's had I been given to reflection during my early years. My Father was a convert with the convert's proverbial ardour. He had been baptised in the Convent chapel with my Sister and myself—I was eight years old at the time—and many who were present declared it the most touching ceremony they had ever seen. However, to the family, who had not seen it, it was anything but touching. They were all good members of the Episcopal Church and had been since they landed in Virginia; moreover, one of my Father's brothers was an Episcopal clergyman and Head Master of the Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia's bed-rock of religious respectability. The baptism was only conditional, for the Catholic Church baptizes conditionally those who have been baptized in any church before, but even so it must have been trying to them as a precaution insolently superfluous. I do not remember that anything was ever said, or suggested, or hinted. But there was an undercurrent of disapproval that, child as I was, I felt, though I could not have put it into words. One thing plain was that when we children went off to our church with my Father, we were going where nobody else in my Grandfather's house went, except the servants, and that, for some incomprehensible reason, it was rather an odd sort of thing for us to do, making us different from most people we knew in Philadelphia.

THE PULPIT, ST. PETER'S

Nor had I the chance to lose sight of this difference at the Convent. The education I was getting there, when not devoted to launching my soul into Paradise, was preparing me for the struggle against the temptations of the world which, from all I heard about it, I pictured as a horrible gulf of evil yawning at the Convent gate, ready to swallow me up the minute that gate shut behind me. To face it was an ordeal so alarming in anticipation that there was an interval when I convinced myself it would be infinitely safer, by becoming a nun, not to face it at all. If I stopped to give the world a name, it was bound to be Philadelphia, the place in which I was destined to live upon leaving the Convent. I knew that it was Protestant, as we often prayed for the conversion of its people, I the harder because they included my relations who if not converted could, my catechism taught me, be saved only so as by the invincible ignorance with which I hardly felt it polite to credit them. To what other conclusion could I come, arguing logically, than that Philadelphia was the horrible gulf of evil yawning for me, and that in this gulf Protestants swarmed, scattering temptation along the path of the Catholic who walked alone among them?—an idea of Philadelphia that probably would have surprised nobody more than the nuns who were training me for my life of struggle in it.

The gulf of the world did not seem so evil once it swallowed me up, but that socially the Catholic walked in it alone, there could be no mistake. When eventually I left school and began going out on my modest scale, I could not fail to see that the people I met in church were not, as a rule, the people I met at the Dancing Class, or at parties, or at receptions, or on that abominable round of morning calls, and this was the more surprising because Philadelphians of the "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine" set were accustomed to meeting each other wherever they went. Except for the small group of those Philadelphia families of French descent with French names who were not descendants of the Huguenots, and here and there a convert like my Father, and an occasional native Philadelphian who, unaccountably, had always been a Catholic, the congregation, whether I went to the Cathedral or St. John's, to St. Joseph's or St. Patrick's, was chiefly Irish, as also were the priests when they were not Italians.

Fashion sent the Philadelphian to the Episcopal Church. It could not have been otherwise in a town as true to tradition as Philadelphia had not ceased to be in my young days. No sooner had Episcopalians settled in Philadelphia than, by their greater grandeur of dress and manner, they showed the greater social aspirations they had brought with them from the other side—the Englishman's confidence in the social superiority of the Church of England to all religion outside of it. Presbyterians are said to have had a pretty fancy in matters of wigs and powdered and frizzled hair, which may also have been symbolic, for they followed a close fashionable second. Baptists and Methodists, on the contrary, affected to despise dress and, while I cannot say if the one fact has anything to do with the other, I knew fewer Baptists and Methodists than Catholics. By my time the belief that no one could be "a gentleman" outside the Church of England, or its American offshoot, was stronger than ever, and fashion required a pew at St. Mark's or Holy Trinity or St. James's, if ancient lineage did not claim one at St. Peter's or Christ Church; though old-fashioned people like my Grandfather and Grandmother might cling blamelessly to St. Andrew's which was highly respectable, if not fashionable, and new-fashioned people might brave criticism with the Ritualists at St. Clement's. As for Catholics, a pew down at St. Joseph's in Willing's Alley or, worse still, up town at the Cathedral in Logan Square, put them out of the reckoning, at a hopeless disadvantage socially, however better off they might be for it spiritually. That the Cathedral was in Logan Square was in itself a social offence of a kind that society could not tolerate. At the correct churches every function, every meeting, every Sunday-school, every pious re-union, as well as every service, became a fashionable duty; and at the church door after service on Sunday, a man with whom one had danced the night before might be picked up to walk on Walnut Street with, which was a social observance only less indispensable than attendance at the Assembly and the Dancing Class.

THE CATHEDRAL, LOGAN SQUARE

I recall the excitement of girls of my age, their feeling that they had got to the top of everything, the first time they took this sacramental walk, if not with a man which was the crowning glory, at least with a woman who was prominent, or successful, in society. But I believe I could count the times I joined in the Walnut Street procession on Sunday morning. As long as I lived in Third Street, my usual choice of a church lay between St. Joseph's, the Jesuit church in Willing's Alley with its air of retirement, and St. Mary's on Fourth Street, where the orphans used to come from Seventh and Spruce and sometimes sing an anthem that, for any save musical reasons, I delighted in, and where we had a pew. After we moved from Third Street, our pew was at the Cathedral, more distinguished from the clerical standpoint, for there we sat under the Bishop. No matter which our church, High Mass was long: I could not have got to the appointed part of Walnut Street in time, had I found at the door the companion to go there with me. There was nothing to do but to walk home alone or sedately at my Father's side, and one's Father, however correct he might be under other circumstances, was not the right person for these occasions. On Sundays I could not conceal from myself that I was socially at a discount. The reflection that this was where I, as a Catholic, scored, should have consoled me, for if the Episcopalian was performing a social duty when he went to church, I, as a Catholic, was making a social sacrifice, and sacrifice of some sort is of the essence of religion.

III

If I could but have taken the trouble to be interested, it must also have occurred to me to wonder why St. Joseph's, where I went so often, was hidden in an obscure alley. In Philadelphia, the town of straight streets crossing each other at right angles, it is not easy for a building of the kind to keep out of sight. But not one man in a hundred, not one in a thousand, who, passing along Third Street, looked up Willing's Alley, dreamt for a minute that somewhere in that alley, embedded in a network of brokers' and railroad offices, carefully concealing every trace of itself, was a church with a large congregation. Most churches in Philadelphia, as everywhere, like to display themselves prominently with an elaborate façade, or a lofty steeple, or a green enclosure, or a graveyard full of monuments. St. Peter's, close by, fills a whole block. Christ Church stands flush with the pavement. The simplest Meeting-House, by the beautiful trees that overshadow it or the high walls that enclose it or the bit of green at its door, will not let the passer-by forget it. But St. Joseph's, evidently, did not want to be seen, did not want to be remembered; evidently hesitated to show that its doors were wide and hospitably open to all the world in the beautiful fashion of the Catholic Church. There was something furtive about it, an air of mystery, it was almost as if one were keeping a clandestine appointment with religion when one turned from the street into the humble alley, and from the alley into the silence of the sanctuary.

CHRIST CHURCH, FROM SECOND STREET

Perhaps I thought less about this mysterious aloofness because, once in the church, I felt so much at home. I do not mind owning now, though I would not have owned it then for a good deal, that after my return from the Convent, I had the uncomfortable feeling of being a stranger not only in my town, but in my family. I had been in the Convent eleven years and until this day when I look back to my childhood, it is the Convent I remember as home. St. Joseph's seemed a part of the Convent, therefore of home, that had strayed into the town by mistake. In some ways it was not like the Convent, greatly to my discomfort. The chapel there was dainty in detail, exquisitely kept, the altars fresh with flowers from the Convent garden, and for congregation the nuns and the girls modestly and demurely veiled. But nothing was dainty about St. Joseph's,—men are as untidy in running a church as in keeping a house—it was not well kept, the flowers were artificial and tawdry, and the congregation was largely made up of shabby old Irishwomen. The priests—Jesuits—were mostly Italian, with those unpleasant habits of Italian priests that are a shock to the convent-bred American when she first goes to Italy. They had, however, the virtue of old friends, their faces were familiar, I had known them for years at the Convent which they had frequently visited and where, by special grace, they had refrained from some of the unpleasant habits that offended me at St. Joseph's.

There was Father de Maria, tall, thin, with a wonderful shock of white hair, a fine ascetic face and a kindly smile, not adapted to shine in children's society—too much of a scholar I fancied though I may have been wrong—and with an effect of severity which I do not think he meant, but which had kept me at a safe distance when he came to see us at Torresdale. But he had come, I could not remember the time when I had not known him, and that was in his favour.

There was Father Ardea, a small, shrinking, dark man, from whom also it was more comfortable to keep at a safe distance, so little had he to say and such a trick of looking at you with an "Eh? Eh?" of expectation, as if he relied upon you to supply the talk he had not at his own command. But I could have forgiven him worse, so pleasant a duty did he make of confession. His penances were light and his only comment was "Eh? Eh? my child? But you didn't mean it! You didn't mean it!" until I longed to accuse myself of the Seven Deadly Sins with the Unpardonable Sin thrown in, just to see if he would still assure me that I didn't mean it.

There was Father Bobbelin—our corruption I fancy of Barbelin—a Frenchman, short and fat, sandy-haired, with a round smiling face: the most welcome of all. He was always very snuffy, and always ready to hand round his snuff-box if talk languished when he went out to walk with us, which I liked better than Father Ardea's embarrassing "Eh? Eh?" It was to Father Bobbelin an inexhaustible joke, and the only other I knew him to venture upon resulted in so unheard-of a breach of discipline that ever after we saw less of him and his snuff-box. He was walking with us down Mulberry Avenue one afternoon, the little girls clustered about him as they were always sure to be, and the nun in charge a little behind with the bigger, more sedate girls. When we got to the end of the Avenue, the carriage gate leading straight out into the World was open as it had never been before, as it never was again. Father Bobbelin's fat shoulders shook with laughter. He opened the gate wider. "Now, children," he said, "here's your chance. Run for it!" And we did, we ran as if for our lives, though no children could have loved their school better or wanted less to get away from it. One or two ran as far as the railroad, the most adventurous crossed it, and were making full tilt for the river before all were caught and brought back and sent to bed in disgrace. After that Father Bobbelin visited us only in our class-room.

And there were other priests whose names escape me, but not their home-like faces. Now and then Jesuits who gave Missions and who had conducted the retreats at the Convent, appeared at St. Joseph's,—Father Smarius, the huge Dutchman, so enormous they used to tell us at the Convent that he had never seen his feet for twenty years, who had baptized my Father and his family in the Convent chapel; and Father Boudreau, the silent, shy little Louisianian, whom I remember so well coming with Father Smarius one June day to bless, and sprinkle Holy Water over that big yellow and white house close to the Convent which my Father had taken for the summer; and Father Glackmeyer, and Father Coghlan, and with them others whose presence helped the more to fill St. Joseph's with the intimate convent atmosphere.

IV