And thank you for your note. But does any other nice New York girl of today, wanting to go where I do, ever have such a thing with her folks over it?—like I’m a Gibson girl wanting out to a bordello, from the Newport château. Or have to go through the social occasions I have? Once my aunt and uncle decide to do anything, they do it in style. First, a soiree at Uncle Oscar’s, as not only the man who’s kept my Aunt Aurine and me for the last twenty years in the style she’s accustomed him to, but also as my legal guardian. Then a staff party, in the ancestral Ninth Avenue restaurant that Aurine herself is a bastard daughter of, and that Oscar and I secretly think she still owns. And finally, a blowout from all the crowd who’ve known me since my cradle, which is in fact the two-hundred-dollar lace-flounced bassinet they gave me. All Aurine’s girl friends of her youth, plus the men who keep them. But first I have to get Aurine and Oscar to agree to let me go. Oh, we all three know I’ll go anyway, if I have to.
