Alice Duer Miller

“ As for Hubert Frost, whom your engaging egotism seems to suggest you have discovered, he is well-known among men as a capital fellow—a good man and a good business man. I congratulate you sincerely. Leave me, however, the mild gratification of believing that there are some aspects of your nature which he will never see ”

“ Of course I am sorry and disappointed that you and Winnefred did not hit it off a little better, but it isn't possible, is it, dear, that a woman who at the present moment does not enter in the smallest way into my life should be able to make any real difference between us? ”

“ When I think of the women in New York, older than your mother and without her profile, who are on terms of intimate equality with the season debutantes!
To-morrow we drive out to the old farm, to which, I see, your mother's heart still yearns. She showed me a photograph of you at two, lying on top of a haycart, elegantly attired in an enormous straw hat.
As for Sciossett itself, it may be, as you say, an excellent investment as far as real estate is concerned, but I should be sorry to pass my days there. It contains nothing old enough to be dignified, nor new enough to be smart. ”

“ If you should hear any misinformed persons wondering whether I am really engaged to Hubert Frost, you have my authority to say that the rumor is without foundation. Nobody knows why my engagement is broken but myself, not even Hubert, though I have spent two hours and not a little letter paper trying to explain. ”

“ To one of these alternatives, it seems to me, the thoroughly commonplace, trivial, selfish little woman whom I have just seen and whom you have so worshipped, must commit you. Either one would make me unhappy as your wife, and let me say, as a dispassionate outsider, neither is a point of view which commands my respect. ”

“ He made his money, and a great deal of it, himself. And yet, though I am tolerably mercenary, this has nothing to do with my acceptance of him. I am marrying him because he is a man. And after all the involutions of subtlety and good taste through which I have followed most of my acquaintance, simple, robust masculinity appeals to me. You will, I think, understand when you see him. Lydia.
P. S.—Come to see us, but not for two weeks. I am going to stay with his mother at Sciossett, N. Y.
II But are we so sure, after all, my dear girl, that I am not glad to hear of your engagement? ”