Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/155

 annually on the depressing morning after Christmas. On that spiritless day-after, I feel like a camel that has ruminated on its last cud and can no longer batten on the desert and the west wind. I feel like a wretched silkworm in a glass jar, which will swiftly perish of inanition if not supplied with fresh mulberry leaves. That explains why I pack my bag and, by the first Limited train, creep to the city, under the pretext of reading a paper before one of the learned associations.

What I am coming to is the rather curious fact that the attraction of Cornelia's winter establishment is perhaps due less directly to her than to her husband, and to the refreshing and—for me—delightfully relaxing air of worldliness which circulates around him. Cornelia wonderfully incarnates the Eternal Feminine, which is supposed to draw us upward. But in the interim between Christmas and the New Year's Resolutions one doesn't desire to be drawn upward. All one wants is to escape from ennui and suffocation. In the colloquial idiom of our section, one "wants out." And Oliver, in the negligee of old acquaintance, is a most agreeable, realistic, and sometimes rather witty Mephistopheles, letting one out of conventional and cloistral habits of thought,