All of which is most distressing; but no more so than the notion that women seem to have of what a man likes. I shall never forget the pair of slippers that Aunt Josephine bestowed upon me last year. They were what are technically known as _mules_, but in reality they were a couple of long rafts, each with an arching toe-cabin that would have accommodated both feet. The low racing sterns extended so far aft of my heels that the latter stood almost amidships.
Navigation was difficult. They kept running afoul of each other; so that I would suddenly find my starboard foot partly on the port slipper and mostly on the floor. Sometimes one of them would dart ahead several lengths and capsize, obliging me to turn skipper. No matter how earnestly I lifted their bows, their sterns always dragged. A landsman would have said that my progress resembled pumping a rhapsody on a pianola, or skiing in the Alps.
The unreasonableness of these mules reached a climax one morning while I was visiting the Cholmondeley-Browdens. I encountered my hostess unexpectedly as I was returning from my bath. In the excitement of the moment, both slippers bolted, one of them performing a spectacular flip-flap, and the other skidding through the balustrade of the stairway and landing below in a globe of goldfish; while I made my escape in a state of pedal nudity.
As for the neckties I have received--truly, Love is blind!
ALL, ALL ARE GONE, THE OLD FAMILIAR FAÇADES
Nowadays when it is hard for the casual observer to distinguish Somebody's Mother from Somebody's Jazz Baby, it is not to be wondered at that houses as well as humans are disguising their age. Victorian brownstone mansions that later sank to boarding-house seediness now renew their youth as the "Rubens Studios" or "Haddon Chambers"; drab office buildings, yielding to a sudden access of sand, take on new complexions as talcumy white as those of the flappers passing by.
He would be a tactless and cruel man who would say, "I know when that one's corner stone was laid." Or, "My great uncle knew that one when it was only three stories high." Or, "It didn't have that cornice until its gables began to fall off." Or, "You ought to have seen the stoop it had before they put in the steel braces."